Ashurbanipal

When time goes on, and the world spins, hidden secrets will remain forgotten. Until one day, in a technologically advanced future, historians will discover what once were traces of a past story. In the case of King Ashurbanipal, historians delve into the past and find his vast library of clay tablets and fragments containing texts from his era in the 7th century BC. Among these texts arise stories such as the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, Poor Man of Nippur and the Myth of Adapa. Ashurbanipal’s Library is one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made as it provides thousands of primary sources, giving us an insight into the Mesopotamian world.

This article publishes a royal inscription preserved on a clay tablet housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The inscription, which was intended for display on a stele, commemorates a royal grant of tax exemptions to nine Babylonian cities and presents the royal protagonist as a second Ḫammu-rāpi. The name and titulary of the king in question are not preserved, and the attribution of the inscription is accordingly uncertain. Following Jean-Vincent Scheil's attribution of the text already in 1902, the study that accompanies an edition of the text argues that it should be attributed to Nabonidus, king of Babylon 556-539 BC, and explores its historical significance in this context.

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap5/index.html
In this book, Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers provide updated, reliable editions of seventy-one historical inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, including all historical inscriptions on clay prisms, clay cylinders, wall slabs, and other stone objects from Nineveh, Assur, and Kalhu. Each text edition is accompanied by an English translation, a catalog of all exemplars, a comprehensive bibliography, and commentary containing notes and technical information. This volume also contains a general introduction to the reign of Ashurbanipal, his military campaigns, the corpus of inscriptions, previous studies, and chronology; translations of the relevant passages of several Mesopotamian chronicles and king lists; photographs of objects inscribed with texts of Ashurbanipal; indexes of museum and excavation numbers, selected publications, and proper names.

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/
State Archives of Assyria (SAA) provides editions of texts from the Neo-Assyrian period, organized by genre: administrative letters, administrative records, astrological reports, court poetry, decrees, extispicy queries to the sun-god, grants, legal transactions of the royal court, priestly letters, prophecies, royal ritual, scholarly letters, treaties and loyalty oaths, and votive donations. Since 1987, the University-of-Helsinki-based Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (NATCP), which was founded and directed by Simo Parpola, has published twenty-one of its twenty-two planned volumes, as well as over forty other books in its supplemental series State Archives of Assyria Studies (SAAS) and State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts (SAACT).

The 5056 Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts published in the SAA series, as well as in one volume of SAAS (volume 2), primarily originate from British excavations carried out in the citadel of Nineveh (modern Kuyunjik) between 1850 and 1905 and those conducted at Calah (modern Nimrud) in the early 1950s, and, therefore, most of them are now housed in the British Museum in London; some are presently in the Iraq Museum (Baghdad).

In 2005, at a time when many of the SAA volumes were out of print or difficult to get hold of, longtime NATCP member Karen Radner (then UCL, now LMU Munich) sought out ways of making NATCP's rich and varied heritage data accessible to a wider audience. In collaboration with Eleanor Robson (then University of Cambridge, now UCL) and Steve Tinney (University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), this led to the creation of State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo), with the first parts of the dataset available from 2007 and 2009 via the open-access web resources Knowledge and Power and Assyrian Empire Builders.

The aim of SAAo, which has been part of the LMU-Munich-based Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI; directed by Karen Radner and Jamie Novotny) since August 2015, is to make the 5056 Neo-Assyrian texts published in the State Archives of Assyria Series available online for free in a fully searchable and richly annotated (lemmatised) format, as well as to widely disseminate, facilitate, and promote the active use of these important cuneiform sources in academia and beyond.

SAAo and MOCCI's electronic text editions are implemented with and hosted on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC; http://oracc.org).

For further details, see the "About the Project" page.

The authors are preparing a volume for the Yale Anchor Bible Reference Library, Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch, which will examine the following key questions: (1) What is the date and historical context for the composition of Deuteronomy? (2) What is Deuteronomy’s method of composition? (3) What is the relationship between law and narrative in Deuteronomy? (4) What is the intent of Deuteronomy vis-à-vis its Israelite sources? (5) What is the influence of cuneiform legal and treaty traditions upon Deuteronomy and its Israelite forebears? (6) What is Deuteronomy’s status within the compiled Pentateuch (and the larger biblical canon)? In this article, the authors summarize these issues and then examine Deut 13 and its relevance for dealing with each of them.

Keywords: Tel Tayinat, EST, VTE, Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty, Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon, canon formula, CTH 133, Joshua Berman, Covenant Code, Hittite treaty, biblical law, Deuteronomy, succession, Assurbanipal, Deut 28, Dtn 28, Deut 13, Dtn 13, Pentateuch, law and narrative.

This closer look at the extant E Prism material of Ashurbanipal, the Gyges narrative(s) in particular, reveals that the current understanding of the E Prisms needs to be significantly revised since both the Prism E₁ and Prism E₂ inscriptions very likely contain one and the same description of Gyges’ extraordinary first contact with Ashurbanipal. This new interpretation makes it clear (1) that there were (at least) three E Prism inscriptions and (2) that the Prism E₂ inscription was composed earlier than the Prism E₁ text, and not the other way around as scholars have assumed for over the last forty years. This paper will re-evaluate Ashurbanipal’s E Prisms in light of a previously unrecognized parallel in the earliest accounts of the Gyges narrative.

In 2011, Joshua Berman published a contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate over the sources and dating of Deuteronomy: 'CTH 133 and the Hittite Provenance of Deuteronomy 13.'  Berman asserted that a Hittite treaty text from the fifteenth century B. C. E. (Catalogue des Textes hittites [CTH] 133) provides a closer parallel to Deut 13 than does the seventh century Neo-Assyrian text commonly known as the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon or, more technically, Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty (henceforth, EST). In his estimation, CTH 133 is therefore the preferred literary source for Deut 13. On the basis of those parallels with CTH 133, as well as other similarities that he finds between Deuteronomy and Hittite treaty forms, Berman contended that Deut 13 should be dated to the second millennium B. C. E. The significance of this argument goes to the heart of scholarly methodology and the historical critical method of modern biblical scholarship. If correct, Berman’s claim would overturn the standard scholarly position that the core of Deuteronomy dates to the seventh century, thereby abolishing an Archimedian point scholars use to date other biblical texts.

Because of these methodological implications, we included a brief discussion of Berman’s proposals in an article that recently appeared in this journal, 'Between the Covenant Code and Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty: Deuteronomy 13 and the Composition of Deuteronomy' (2012). The focus of the article, consistent with the theme issue of the journal, was to preview some of the main issues in Deuteronomy research that we will address in the monograph we are preparing for the Yale Anchor Bible Reference Library, Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch. We therefore covered a wide range of methodological and interpretive issues, including a brief discussion of Berman’s proposals. We argued that Berman’s rejection of EST as a source for Deuteronomy does not take due notice of the unique parallels between EST and Deut 28 that lend weight to the evidence for the connection between EST and Deut 13. In addition, we rejected Berman’s claims of a source relationship between CTH 133 and Deut 13, and his dating of the text to the Late Bronze Age, because there is no clear evidence for contact between Israelite scribes and fifteenth century Hittite texts, either in the second millennium or later. Berman has now prepared a full-length rejoinder, which appears in this issue. What follows is our response to that rejoinder.

Berman has reframed the debate as a case study on the comparative method. In addition to responding to our specific criticisms of his work, Berman appears to have two main goals: 1) to advocate for a more inclusive consideration of extra-biblical texts as sources for biblical texts – one consequence of which, he assumes, would be a broader range of potential dates for such biblical texts; and 2) to define the criteria for identifying source texts by highlighting ways in which scholars incorrectly narrow their list of extra-biblical sources. His critiques are rather dramatic, and we have given them our full attention in this response. In the process, we have found that the primary and secondary sources on which Berman relies actually provide stronger arguments for our own views, both textually and at a theoretical level. The clearest way to examine these issues is to start with the specific textual arguments and claims Berman makes about the Hittite provenance of Deut 13, and then to step back and consider the larger theoretical structure of his position.

Keywords:  Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty, Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon, canon formula, CTH 133, Joshua Berman, Covenant Code, Tel Tayinat, EST, VTE, Hittite treaty, biblical law, New Historicism, New Criticism, biblical scholarship, compositional history, Deuteronomy, succession, Assurbanipal, Deut 28, Dtn 28, Deut 13, Dtn 13, Pentateuch, law and narrative.

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/
Numerous royally commissioned texts were composed between 744 BC and 609 BC, a period during which Assyria became the dominant power in southwestern Asia. Eight hundred and fifty to nine hundred such inscriptions are known today. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, under the direction of Professor Grant Frame of the University of Pennsylvania, will publish in print and online all of the known royal inscriptions that were composed during the reigns of the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC), Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Sargon II (721-705 BC), Sennacherib (704-681 BC), Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), Ashurbanipal (668-ca. 631 BC), Aššur-etel-ilāni (ca. 631-627/626 BC), Sîn-šumu-līšir (627/626 BC), Sîn-šarra-iškun (627/626-612 BC), and Aššur-uballiṭ II (611-609 BC), rulers whose deeds were also recorded in the Bible and in some classical sources. The individual texts range from short one-line labels to lengthy, detailed inscriptions with over 1200 lines (4000 words) of text. These Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions (744-609 BC) represent only a small, but important part of the vast Neo-Assyrian text corpus. They are written in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian and provide valuable insight into royal exploits, both on the battlefield and at home, royal ideology, and Assyrian religion. Most of our understanding of the political history of Assyria, and to some extent of Babylonia, comes from these sources. Because this large corpus of texts has not previously been published in one place, the RINAP Project will provide up-to-date editions (with English translations) of Assyrian royal inscriptions from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) to the reign of Aššur-uballiṭ II (611-609 BC) in seven print volumes and online, in a fully lemmatized and indexed format. The aim of the project is to make this vast text corpus easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. RINAP Online will allow those interested in Assyrian culture, history, language, religion, and texts to efficiently search Akkadian and Sumerian words appearing in the inscriptions and English words

This joint study of Novotny and Watanabe deals with the personal and ethnic identity of four foreigners depicted on a wall relief of the North Palace in Nineveh as submitting to Ashurbanipal after the fall of Babylon. The study analyzed the pictographic details with circumstantial evidence from the king’s inscriptions.

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/
From the start of the Second Dynasty of Isin (1157-1026 BC) to the end of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty (625-539 BC), over 80 men claimed suzerainty over the land of Sumer and Akkad, an area roughly comprising modern-day southern Iraq; the number greatly increases to about 130 if one also includes the kings of the later Persian and Greek (Macedonian and Seleucid) Periods. These Babylonian rulers, some of whom proudly referred to themselves as the 'king of Babylon' (a title divinely sanctioned by that city's tutelary deity, Marduk), had inscriptions officially commissioned in their names, sometimes to boast about an accomplishment of theirs (often the renovation of a temple or the construction of a palace or city wall) and sometimes to simply indicate that an object belonged to them.

Over 400 Akkadian and/or Sumerian royal inscriptions from these periods survive today. Those texts are preserved on more than 1,800 clay, metal, and stone objects, over half of which date to the reign of the famous Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC). The majority of these are assumed to have been unearthed in the ruins of one of the major cult centers of Babylonia: Babylon, Borsippa, Nippur, Sippar, Ur, and Uruk. Many of the bricks, clay cylinders, clay prisms, clay tablets, paving stones, foundation blocks, beads, etc. discovered through scientific archaeological excavations or illicit digs have made their way into numerous museum and private collections around the world; some objects, especially those that were too heavy to haul back to Europe or North America, were left and buried in the field by their excavators after their contents were recorded, copied, and/or photographed.

The aim of RIBo, a sub-project of the Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (OIMEA) Project, is to publish in a single place easily accessible and annotated (lemmatized) editions of all of the known Akkadian and Sumerian royal inscriptions from Babylonia that were composed between 1157 BC and 64 BC. RIBo's contents are divided into several sub-projects, generally by "dynasty" or period. The "dynastic" numbering follows that of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Babylonian Periods (RIMB) publications of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project. The sub-project numbering is as follows:

"Babylon 1" = Kassite Period (1595-1155 BC).
"Babylon 2" = Second Dynasty of Isin (1157-1026 BC).
"Babylon 3" = Second Dynasty of the Sealand (1025-1005 BC).
"Babylon 4" = Bazi Dynasty (1004-985 BC).
"Babylon 5" = Elamite Dynasty (984-979 BC).
"Babylon 6" = Uncertain Dynasties (978-626 BC).
"Babylon 7" = Neo-Babylonian Dynasty (625-539 BC).
"Babylon 8" = Akkadian inscriptions of the Persian Period (538-330 BC), especially the now-famous "Cyrus Cylinder."
"Babylon 9" = Macedonian rulers of Mesopotamia (currently no inscriptions known).
"Babylon 10" = Seleucid era (305-64 BC) official inscriptions written in Akkadian, especially the "Antiochus (Borsippa) Cylinder."