Books in the Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (SANER) series

Ugaritic literary and ritual studies have often neglected or even ignored the Akkadian material from the same archives, which can be used as a frame of reference for the Ugaritic texts. The aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive study of the consonantal (Ugaritic) as well as the syllabic (Akkadian) incantation and anti-witchcraft texts from Ras Shamra as a unified corpus. These texts, dealing with impending dangers (mainly snakebites) and witchcraft attacks, are placed in the context of Ancient Near Eastern magic literature. A discussion of general topics, including magic and religion, the Ugaritic gods of magic, and the definition of incantation, is followed by a new collation and translation of the Akkadian texts, as well as new photographic material for both series. The main focus of this book is the close reading of the consonantal texts in the context of the much larger and better analyzed corpus of Akkadian magic literature.

In contrast to other traditions, cultic laments in Mesopotamia were not performed in response to a tragic event, such as a death or a disaster, but instead as a preemptive ritual to avert possible catastrophes. Mesopotamian laments provide a unique insight into the relationship between humankind and the gods, and their study sheds light on the nature of collective rituals within a crosscultural context. Cultic laments were performed in Mesopotamia for nearly 3000 years. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this important ritual practice in the early 2nd millennium BCE, the period during which Sumerian laments were first put in writing. It also includes a new translation and critical edition of Uruamairabi ('That city, which has been plundered'), one of the most widely performed compositions of its genre.

This book explores the reasons for which weights and scales were used to measure goods in Early Mesopotamia (ca. 3,200-2,000 BCE). The cuneiform records from this period sheds light on the development of this cultural innovation. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of this cultural and economic phenomenon, which both reflected and shaped the relationships between individuals and groups in Mesopotamia throughout the third millennium BCE.

Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees and animals) vie over their respective merits in a series of elaborate, flowery speeches. Known in virtually every Middle Eastern culture from Antiquity to the present day, it represents one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature from various regions and times.

Babylonia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE is one of the most understudied periods of Mesopotamian history. In the last few years, discoveries of new texts and archaeological materials from the Sealand Dynasty have emerged, which expand the possibilities to fill this gap in our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. At the same time, scholars have started to revive Kassite studies using new materials, methods, and questions. While those works are groundbreaking contributions to the field, many questions about the history and chronology, archaeology, economy, language of Babylonia during this period are still unsolved. This volume brings together eleven contributions by leading scholars in the Sealand and Kassite period, approaching those questions from an archaeological, ethnological, historical, linguistic, and economical point of view. The book opens with an introduction into the history and research on Babylonia under the Sealand Dynasty and the Kassites.

In the first half of the 2d millennium BCE, translation occasionally depicted semantically incongruous correspondences. Such cases reflect ancient scribes substantiating their virtuosity with cuneiform writing by capitalizing on phonologic, graphemic, semantic, and other resemblances in the interlingual space. These scholar-scribes employed an essential scribal practice, analogical hermeneutics, an interpretative activity grounded in analogical reasoning and empowered by the potentiality of the cuneiform script. Scribal education systematized such practices, allowing scribes to utilize these habits in copying compositions and creating translations. In scribal education, analogical hermeneutics is exemplified in the word list "e;Izi"e;, both in its structure and in its occasional bilingualism. By examining "e;Izi"e; as a product of the social field of scribal education, this book argues that scribes used analogical hermeneutics to cultivate their craft and establish themselves as knowledgeable scribes. Within a linguistic epistemology of cuneiform scribal culture, translation is a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable scholar.

There are few studies that deal with an overall treatment of the Hittite administrative system, and various other works on its offices and officials have tended to be limited in scope, focusing only on certain groups or certain time periods. This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the administrative organization of the Hittite state throughout its history (ca. 1650-1180 BCE) with particular emphasis on the state offices and their officials. Bringing together previous works and updating with data recovered in recent years, the study presents a detailed survey of the high offices of the state, a prosopographical study of about 140 high officials, and a theoretical analysis of the Hittite administration in respect to factors such as hierarchy, kinship, and diachronical changes.

Shulgi-simti is an important example of a woman involved in sponsoring religious activities though having a family life. An Ox of One's Own will be of interest to Assyriologists, particularly those interested in Early Mesopotamia, and scholars working on women in religion. An Ox of One's Own centers on the archive of a woman who died about 2050 B.C., one of King Shulgi's many wives. Her birth name is unknown, but when she married, she became Shulgi-simti, "e;Suitable for Shulgi."e; Attested for only about 15 years, she existed among a court filled with other wives, who probably outranked her. A religious foundation was run on her behalf whereby courtiers, male and female, donated livestock for sacrifices to an unusual mix of goddesses and gods.Previous scholarship has declared this a rare example of a queen conducting women's religion, perhaps unusual because they say she came from abroad. The conclusions of this book are quite different.An Ox of One's Own lays out the evidence that another woman was queen at this time in Nippur while Shulgi-simti lived in Ur and was a third-ranking concubine at best, with few economic resources. Shulgi-simti's religious exercises concentrated on a quartet of north Babylonian goddesses.

Scholars often assume that the nature of Mesopotamian kingship was such that questioning royal authority was impossible. This volume challenges that general assumption, by presenting an analysis of the motivations,methods, and motifs behind a scholarly discourse about kingship that arose in the final stages of the last Mesopotamian empires. The focus of the volume is the proliferation of a literature that problematizes authority in the Neo-Assyrian period, when texts first begin to specifically explore various modalities for critique of royalty. This development is symptomatic of a larger discourse about the limits of power that emerges after the repatriation of Marduk's statue to Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I in the 12th century BCE. From this point onwards, public attitudes toward Marduk provide a framework for the definition of proper royal behavior, and become a point of contention between Assyria and Babylonia. It is in this historical and political context that several important Akkadian compositions are placed. The texts are analyzed from a new perspective that sheds light on their original milieux and intended functions.

These essays represent a summation of Piotr Steinkeller's decades-long thinking and writing about the history of third millennium BCE Babylonia and the ways in which it is reflected in ancient historical and literary sources and art, as well as of how these written and visual materials may be used by the modern historian to attain, if not a reliable record of histoire evenementielle, a comprehensive picture of how the ancients understood their history. The book focuses on the history of early Babylonian kingship, as it evolved over a period from Late Uruk down to Old Babylonian times, and the impact of the concepts of kingship on contemporaneous history writing and visual art. Here comparisons are drawn between Babylonia and similar developments in ancient Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Other issues treated is the intersection between history writing and the scholarly, lexical, and literary traditions in early Babylonia; and the question of how the modern historian should approach the study of ancient sources of "e;historical"e; nature. Such a broad and comprehensive overview is novel in Mesopotamian studies to date. As such, it should contribute to an improved and more nuanced understanding of early Babylonian history.

This book brings together our present-day knowledge about textile terminology in the Akkadian language of the first-millennium BC. In fact, the progress in the study of the Assyrian dialect and its grammar and lexicon has shown the increasing importance of studying the language as well as cataloging and analysing the terminology of material culture in the documentation of the first world empire. The book analyses the terms for raw materials, textile procedures, and textile end products consumed in first-millennium BC Assyria. In addition, a new edition of a number of written records from Neo-Assyrian administrative archives completes the work. The book also contains a number of tables, a glossary with all the discussed terms, and a catalogue of illustrations. In light of the recent development of textile research in ancient languages, the book is aimed at providing scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies and ancient textile studies with a comprehensive work on the Assyrian textiles.

This volume examines the state ideology of Assyria in the Early Neo-Assyrian period (934-745 BCE) focusing on how power relations between the Mesopotamian deities, the Assyrian king, and foreign lands are described and depicted. It undertakes a close reading of delimited royal inscriptions and iconography making use of postcolonial and gender theory, and addresses such topics as royal deification, "e;religious imperialism"e;, ethnicity and empire, and gendered imagery. The important contribution of this study lies especially in its identification of patterns of ideological continuity and variation within the reigns of individual rulers, between various localities, and between the different rulers of this period, and in its discussion of the place of Early Neo-Assyrian state ideology in the overall development of Assyrian propaganda. It includes several indexed appendices, which list all primary sources, present all divine and royal epithets, and provide all of the "e;royal visual representations,"e; and incorporates numerous illustrations, such as maps, plans, and royal iconography.

Ever since the archaeological rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, generations of scholars have attempted to reconstruct the "e;real Babylon,"e; known to us before from the evocative biblical account of the Tower of Babel. After two centuries of excavations and scholarship, Mario Liverani provides an insightful overview of modern, Western approaches, theories, and accounts of the ancient Near Eastern city.

The cuneiform tablets from Ebla (3rd milleniumBC) attest to the most ancient Semitic language and provide insight into a period in the history and religion of Syria that was previously unknown. The restoration, interpretation, and classification of these tablets has taken more than thirty years. This volume presents a collection of49 essays from one of the foremost experts on Ebla and its broader ancient context and includes important studies on the language, society, political relations, and religion of this ancient Near Eastern city-state.

This book investigates the issue of the singularity versus the multiplicity of ancient Near Eastern deities who are known by a common first name but differentiated by their last names, or geographic epithets. It focuses primarily on the Istar divine names in Mesopotamia, Baal names in the Levant, and Yahweh names in Israel, and it is structured around four key questions: How did the ancients define what it meant to be a god - or more pragmatically, what kind of treatment did a personality or object need to receive in order to be considered a god by the ancients? Upon what bases and according to which texts do modern scholars determine when a personality or object is a god in an ancient culture? In what ways are deities with both first and last names treated the same and differently from deities with only first names? Under what circumstances are deities with common first names and different last names recognizable as distinct independent deities, and under what circumstances are they merely local manifestations of an overarching deity? The conclusions drawn about the singularity of local manifestations versus the multiplicity of independent deities are specific to each individual first name examined in accordance with the data and texts available for each divine first name.

The Sealand kingdom arose from the rebellion against Babylonian hegemony in the latter half of the 18th century BCE., forcing it to share power over Sumer and Akkad. Although its kings maintained themselves throughout the turmoil leading to the demise of the Amorite dynasty at Babylon, it remains one of the most poorly documented Mesopotamian polities. Until recently, it was known to us mainly through its inclusion into later king lists and chronicles, but the recent publication of well over 400 archival texts from a Sealand palace, soon followed by literary and divinatory tablets, finally makes it possible to study this polity from primary sources. This book proposes a history of the Sealand kingdom based on the new evidence and a reevaluation of previously known sources. The aspects examined are: the economy - mainly the palatial administration and transformation of agricultural and animal resources; the panthea and the palace-sponsored cult, which show that Sealand I kings may have positioned their rule in a Larsean tradition; the political history, including a discussion of the geography and the relative chronology; the recording and transmission of knowledge on the Sealand I dynasty in Mesopotamian historiography.

Malgre l'interet porte par les hellenistes et les assyriologues a l'histoire economique de la Basse Mesopotamie durant les deux siecles de domination macedonienne (331-129 av. J.-C.), on ne peut que constater l'absence d'etude systematique sur le sujet. Les sources, pourtant, ne manquent pas : on compte en effet plusieurs milliers de tablettes cuneiformes pour cette periode, auxquelles viennent s'ajouter plus de 25 000 sceaux inscrits en grec, le temoignage des auteurs classiques, ainsi que les riches donnees numismatiques et archeologiques. Cet ouvrage propose pour la premiere fois une synthese accessible de cette documentation, a travers une etude d'histoire regionale prenant en compte l'ensemble des sources disponibles et le poids des heritages mesopotamiens. Le lecteur y trouvera non seulement des points de synthese commodes sur des dossiers complexes (impact du regne d'Alexandre, politique seleucide dans la region, evolution des prix, developpement des activites bancaires etc.) mais aussi des etudes nouvelles (effets de la crise des Diadoques, introduction du monnayage compte, evolution du systeme prebendaire, disparition des sanctuaires traditionnels etc.) qui jettent un jour nouveau sur l'economie de l'une des regions les plus richement documentees du monde hellenistique.

This volume will include critical and collated editions of all the inscriptions of the 1st-millennium Babylonian kings Nabopolassar (626-605), Amel-Marduk (biblical Evil-Merodach, 561-560), and Neriglissar (559-556). The editions will be preceded by an in-depth study and followed by a glossary and concordance of the inscriptions as well as complete indexes of toponyms, anthroponyms, and theonyms. The volume includes aCD-ROM with high-definition full-color digital images of the inscriptions.

Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (SANER) is a peer-reviewed series devoted to the publication of monographs pertaining to all aspects of the history, culture, literature, religion, art, and archaeology of the Ancient Near East, from the earliest historical periods to Late Antiquity. The aim of this series is to present in-depth studies of the written and material records left by the civilizations and cultures that populated the various areas of the Ancient Near East: Anatolia, Arabia, Egypt, Iran, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Syria. Thus, SANER is open to all sorts of works that have something new to contribute and which are relevant to scholars and students within the continuum of regions, disciplines, and periods that constitute the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies, as well as to those in neighboring disciplines, including Biblical Studies, Classics, and Ancient History in general. All submissions to SANER are thoroughly reviewed by scholars with acknowledged expertise in the subject matter. Once a manuscript is accepted for publication, it goes through the careful production process that has characterized books published by Walter De Gruyter since 1749. General Editor:Gonzalo Rubio, Pennsylvania State University, Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Department of History, University Park, PA, USA. Editors:Nicole Brisch, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.Petra Goedegebuure, University of Chicago, USA.Amelie Kuhrt, University College London, UK. Peter Machinist, Harvard University, USA.Piotr Michalowski, University of Michigan, USA.Cecile Michel, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France.Beate Pongratz-Leisten, New York University, USA.D.T. Potts, New York University, USA.Kim Ryholt, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Assembles scholars working on cuneiform texts from different periods to examine the range of social, cultural, and historical contexts in which specific types of texts circulated. Using different methodologies, this title reconstructs the contexts in which various cuneiform texts circulated, providing a framework to determine how they functioned.

Economic history is well documented in Assyriology, thanks to the preservation of dozens of thousands of clay tablets recording administrative operations, contracts and acts dealing with family law. Despite these voluminous sources, the topic of work and the contribution of women have rarely been addressed.This book examines occupations involving women over the course of three millennia of Near Eastern history. It presents the various aspects of women as economic agents inside and outside of the family structure. Inside the family, women were the main actors in the production of goods necessary for everyday life. In some instances, their activities exceeded the simple needs of the household and were integrated within the production of large organizations or commercial channels. The contributions presented in this volume are representative enough to address issues in various domains: social, economic, religious, etc., from varied points of view: archaeological, historical, sociological, anthropological, and with a gender perspective.This book will be a useful tool for historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and graduate students interested in the economy of the ancient Near East and in women and gender studies.