First Millennium BC

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/btto/
Babylonian Topographical Texts online (BTTo) currently includes fully searchable and richly annotated (lemmatized) editions of some of the most important texts published in the books A.R. George, Babylonian Topographical Texts (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 40; Leuven: Peeters, 1992) and A.R. George, House Most High: The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia (Mesopotamian Civilizations 5; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1993): e.g., Tintir = Babylon — the most important cuneiform source for the topography of Babylon, which lists and explains the sacred names of the city, its temples, and its other important topographical features and whose purpose was to glorify Babylon as Babylonia's pre-eminent religious center — and the Canonical Temple List — which lists over 600 temples and their divine owners and a composition known from three clay tablets discovered in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (669-ca. 631 BC).

By the end of August 2022, this open-access site will include lemmatized editions (transliterations with English and German translations) of all sixty-four Babylonian topographical texts included in George BTT and all nine temple lists published in George HMH. These editions will be accompanied by webpages that will make information about these scholarly compositions easily and freely accessible to anyone interested in the topic.

BTTo is part of the three-year, LMU-Munich-based project Living Among Ruins: The Experience of Urban Abandonment in Babylonia, which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung as part of the program "Lost Cities. Wahrnehmung von und Leben mit verlassenen Städten in den Kulturen der Welt," coordinated by Prof. Dr. Martin Zimmermann (Historisches Seminar; LMU Munich), and Prof. Dr. Andreas Beyer (University of Basel). BTTo is funded from September 2019 to August 2022.

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap1/index.html
The Royal Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 BC) and Shalmaneser V (726–722 BC), Kings of Assyria (Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 1) carries on where the Assyrian Periods sub-series of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project ended. The volume provides reliable, up-to-date editions of seventy-three royal inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III and of his son and immediate successor Shalmaneser V, eleven late Neo-Assyrian inscriptions which may be attributed to one of those two eighth-century rulers, and eight texts commissioned by Assyrian queens and high-ranking officials. Following the style of the now-defunct RIM series, each text edition (with its English translation) is supplied with a brief introduction containing general information, a catalogue containing basic information about all exemplars, a commentary containing further technical information and notes, and a comprehensive bibliography.

RINAP 1 also includes: (1) a general introduction to the reigns of Tiglath-pileser III and Shalmaneser V, the corpus of inscriptions, previous studies, and dating and chronology; (2) translations of the relevant passages of Mesopotamian king lists and chronicles; (3) several photographs of objects inscribed with texts of Tiglath-pileser III and Shalmaneser V; (4) indices of museum and excavation numbers and selected publications; and (5) indices of proper names (Personal Names; Geographic, Ethnic, and Tribal Names; Divine Names; Gate, Palace, and Temple Names; and Object Names).

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap4/index.html
The Royal Inscription of Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (680-669 BC) is the inaugural volume of the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period Project. The volume provides reliable, up-to-date editions of all of the known royal inscriptions of Esarhaddon, a son of Sennacherib who ruled Assyria for twelve years (680-669 BC). Editions of 143 firmly identifiable texts (which mostly describe successful battles and the completion of building projects, all done ad maiorem gloriam deorum), 29 poorly preserved late Neo-Assyrian inscriptions that may be attributed to him, and 10 inscriptions commissioned by his mother Naqia (Zakutu) and his wife Esharra-hammat are included. To make this corpus more user-friendly to both specialist and laymen, each text edition (with its English translation) is supplied with a brief introduction containing general information, a catalogue containing basic information about all exemplars, a commentary containing further technical information and notes, and a comprehensive bibliography (arranged chronologically from earliest to latest).

The volume also includes: (1) a general introduction to the reign of Esarhaddon, the corpus of inscriptions, previous studies, and dating and chronology; (2) translations of the relevant passages of three Mesopotamian chronicles; (3) 19 photographs of objects inscribed with texts of Esarhaddon; (4) indexes of museum and excavation numbers and selected publications; and (5) indexes of proper names (Personal Names; Geographic, Ethnic, and Tribal Names; Divine, Planet, and Star Names; Gate, Palace, Temple, and Wall Names; and Object Names). The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing transliterations of selected inscriptions arranged in a 'musical score' format.

This collection of studies on temple building honors Richard Ellis. The first part explores the richness of textual evidence in Ancient Near East cultures: among others Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Elamite, Hittite, Achaemenid. The second part is devoted to various passages of the Hebrew Bible dealing with the building of temples: among others, the building of the First Temple, the Chronicler’s Temple Building account, temple reform in Ezekiel, and the instructions for building the tabernacle in Exodus 25ff. The volume is supplemented by an extensive collection of short descriptions of ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Hebrew texts dealing with temple building and will thus serve as a comprehensive and useful reader.

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 the 2016 campaign of the Wādī al-Jīzī Archaeological Project a rich collection of Iron Age funerary artefacts was found from disturbed (probably collective) burials in the Wādī Fizḥ. These graves have relatively few comparanda in Eastern Arabia and are therefore of some significance for our understanding of this periods. In this paper we will first discuss the broader Iron Age cultural landscape of the Wādī Fizḥ, and then focus on the cemetery site. We will discuss the pottery, soft-stone vessels, and miscellaneous artefacts retrieved from these grave contexts, and compare our data with those from other sites in Oman and the Emirates.

Keywords: Wādī Fizḥ, collective burials, Iron Age, soft-stone vessels, ceramics

THIS IS A TYPESCRIPT. WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO UPLOAD THE PUBLISHED VERSION OF OUR PAPER ONTO ACADEMIA.

Website: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/atae/
Numerous legal and administrative texts have been discovered at numerous site across the Assyrian Empire. These include the principal Assyrian cities Nineveh (Kuyunjik), Assur (Qalat Sherqat) and Kalhu (Nimrud; biblical Calah), as well as smaller provincial centers such as Burmarina (Tell Shiukh Fawqani), Dur-Katlimmu (Tell Sheikh Hamad), Guzana (Tell Halaf), Huzirina (Sultantepe), Imgur-Enlil (Balawat), Ma'allanate (unidentified), Marqasu (Kahramanmaraş), Sam'al (Zinçirli), Šibaniba (Tell Billa), Til-Barsip (Tell Ahmar), and Tušhan (Ziyaret Tepe). The aim of the Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire (ATAE) Project is to expand the Nineveh-focused State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo) corpus by creating a complete, open-access corpus of Neo-Assyrian archival texts. Unlike SAAo, the linguistical-annotated texts in the ATAE corpus are arranged by their provenance and the archive in which they were unearthed. The archive designations used by ATAE follow Olof Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500-300 B.C., Bethesda 1987, a PDF of which can be downloaded here.

Neo-Assyrian archival texts provide important insights into the economic and legal history of the Assyrian Empire, while also presenting modern scholars with vital impressions of societal structures and private lives of the period. The aim of the project is to make this text corpus easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public.

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/riao/
rom the last quarter of the third millennium BC to the last decade of the middle seventh century BC, Assyria (lit. 'the land of [the god] Aššur') rose from a small, yet important trading center to be the largest, most powerful empire in the Middle East in antiquity. Assyria reached its apex under king Ashurbanipal (668–ca. 631 BC), the grandson of Sennacherib (704–681 BC). However, about twenty years after his death, this once-great empire ceased to exist as a political entity; its most important cities, including the administrative capital Nineveh and the religious center Ashur, lay abandoned and desolate, destroyed by the Babylonians and Medes. During the course of its long history, over 110 men ruled over Assyria, whose heartland roughly comprises modern-day northern Iraq.

Most, if not all, of Assyria's rulers, the earliest of whom called themselves 'vice-regent of (the god) Aššur' — like their southern Akkadian, Sumerian, and Babylonian counterparts — had (numerous) inscriptions officially commissioned in their names. These royal texts ("Assyrian Royal Inscriptions") were generally written in the first person and frequently boasted about one or more of the achievements of their royal patrons, primarily for the purpose of divine recognition and for posterity. In addition to describing military campaigns and hunting expeditions (lions or elephants), many Assyrian inscriptions describe the construction or renovation of monumental buildings (temples, palaces, walls, etc.) and include frequent allusions to religious matters (e.g., the New Year's festival). Sometimes, these inscriptions were written to simply indicate that an object belonged to them.

Over 1,900 Akkadian and Sumerian royal inscriptions written in the names of Assyria's rulers, prominent members of their families, and their officials survive today. Those texts are preserved on several thousand clay, metal, and stone objects. The majority of these are assumed to have been unearthed in the ruins of the three main cities of Assyria: Ashur, Calah, and Nineveh. 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.

Following in the footsteps of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project (directed by A. Kirk Grayson; University of Toronto) and in cooperation with the NEH-funded Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project (directed by Grant Frame, University of Pennsylvania [2008–23]), the aim of RIAo, 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 Assyria (and Babylonia when it was under Assyrian domination) that were composed from the end of the third millennium BC to 612 BC.

Starting in 2022, under the direction of Karen Radner and Grant Frame, the Royal Inscriptions of Assyria (RIA) publication project was formerly established. This new publication project —whose printed volumes will be published by Eisenbrauns, an imprint of Penn State University Press — aims to provide updated editions of the complete corpus of Akkadian inscriptions of the Assyrian rulers from the late third millennium BC to the reign of Aššur-narari V (754–745 BC). In essence, the publications of the Royal Inscriptions of Assyria (RIA) series will serve as "second editions" of the three authoritative volumes prepared by A. Kirk Grayson (1987–96) for the Assyrian Periods sub-series of the University-of-Toronto-based Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) series, which was published by University of Toronto Press: Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC) (1987), Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114–859 BC) (1991), and Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858–745 BC) (1996) (= RIMA 1–3). Work on The Royal Inscriptions of Assyria, Part 4: Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) (by A. Kirk Grayson and J. Caleb Howard, with the assistance of Jamie Novotny) is already underway; revised translations of the "RIA 4" texts (by Novotny) are presently accessible via the RIA 4 corpus, as well as in the main RIAo corpus. For further details, see the "About the Project" page.

This paper investigates agricultural practices during the 1st millennium BCE in Greece. New archaeobotanical data provide fresh insights on the plant economy at the urban centers of Sikyon and Olynthos, dated to the Archaic-Classical period. The results show that the staple economy of Sikyon and Olynthos was based on a broad spectrum. However, the analysis records the presence of taxa such as sesame (Sesamum indicum) and pine (Pinus pinea) that are usually absent in assemblages from Greece. In order to understand the role and the place of these sites within the ancient Greek world, we draw a wider comparison of the ubiquity of the main economic taxa using available archaeobotanical records, covering the Protogeometric period to the end of the Hellenistic period. This paper gives an overview of plants exploited during the 1st millennium BCE and also focuses on the unusual remains recently recovered.

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/armep/
The LMU Munich- and Humboldt Foundation-funded Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Polities (ARMEP) is the parent project of Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (OIMEA) and Archival Texts of the Middle East in Antiquity (ATMEA). At present, ARMEP is an umbrella project that is intended to facilitate quick and easy access to a wide range of open-access editions of ancient Middle Eastern texts. ARMEP is both an Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) project and an interactive map interface.

ARMEP currently contains about 49,500 ancient texts, most of which were written in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages and in cuneiform script. Most of these inscribed composite texts and artifacts were discovered in modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, while others originate from Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Although the texts range in date from ca. 2334 to 64 BC, the majority come from Neo-Assyrian (744-612 BC) and Neo-Babylonian (625-539 BC) times. The dataset is derived from the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) and it includes texts from the following projects: Astronomical Diaries Digital (ADsD); Akkadian ARMEP currently contains about 41,300 ancient texts, most of which were written in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages and in cuneiform script. Most of these inscribed composite texts and artifacts were discovered in modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, while others originate from Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Although the texts range in date from ca. 2334 to 64 BC, the majority come from Neo-Assyrian (744-612 BC) and Neo-Babylonian (625-539 BC) times. The dataset is derived from the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) and it includes texts from the following projects: Astronomical Diaries Digital (ADsD); Akkadian Love Literature (akklove); Amarna Texts (Amarna); Bilinguals in Late Mesopotamian Scholarship (BLMS); Corpus of Ancient Mesopotamian Scholarship (CAMS); Corpus of Akkadian Shuila-Prayers online (CASPo); Cuneiform Commentaries Project (CCPo); Corpus of Kassite Sumerian Texts (CKST); Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts (DCCLT); Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts (DCCMT); Electronic Corpus of Urartian Texts (eCUT; LMU Munich); Electronic Idrimi (idrimi); Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI); Inscriptions of Suhu online (Suhu; LMU Munich); Old Babylonian Model Contracts (OBMC); Old Babylonian Tabular Accounts (OBTA); Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo; LMU Munich); Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo; LMU Munich) Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP; UPenn and LMU Munich);State Archives of Assyria online (SAA; formerly UCL, now LMU Munich); and Text Corpus of Middle Assyrian (TCMA). Non-LMU Munich material was generously contributed by Jacob Jan de Ridder, Eckart Frahm, Shlomo Izre'el, Enrique Jiménez, Jacob Lauinger, Alan Lenzi, Reinhard Pirngruber, Eleanor Robson, Gabriella Spada, Steve Tinney, Niek Veldhuis, Nathan Wasserman, and Gábor Zólyomi. Images used in the detail views are courtesy of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). The texts can be accessed via the standard Oracc-based, catalogue-style pager or via our interactive ARMEP 2.0 map interface.


Moreover, ARMEP is also a powerful multi-project search engine that enables anyone to simultaneously search the translations, transliterations, and catalogue metadata of more than 49,500 ancient texts. As an informational and search hub, as well as interactive map interface, ARMEP strives to make a vast and varied corpus of ancient records easily and freely accessible to every scholar, student, and member of the general public.

In the 2016 campaign of the Wādī al-Jīzī Archaeological Project a rich collection of Iron Age funerary artefacts was found from disturbed (probably collective) burials in the Wādī Fizḥ. These graves have relatively few comparanda in Eastern Arabia and are therefore of some significance for our understanding of this periods. In this paper we will first discuss the broader Iron Age cultural landscape of the Wādī Fizḥ, and then focus on the cemetery site. We will discuss the pottery, soft-stone vessels, and miscellaneous artefacts retrieved from these grave contexts, and compare our data with those from other sites in Oman and the Emirates. Keywords: Wādī Fizḥ, collective burials, Iron Age, soft-stone vessels, ceramics THIS IS A TYPESCRIPT. WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO UPLOAD THE PUBLISHED VERSION OF OUR PAPER ONTO ACADEMIA.