A Babylonian Scholar in Assur

Conceptualizing Past, Present and Future: Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium of the Melammu Project Held in Helsinki / Tartu May 18–24, 2015 (MS 9), 2018

Temple Building in Assyria. Evidence from Royal Inscriptions, 2010

Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2008

Introduction 1he landscape of ancient Mesopotamia did not favour permanence. 'The meandering courses of the Tigris and Euphrates constantly reshaped the plain, carving out new channels over time and leaving old ones dry.' Without access to water, cities along the old channels suffered losses of population or even abandonment; temples, palaces, and city walls, built as they were of mud brick, quickly deteriorated into earthen mounds if not properly maintained and repaired. 2 The lack of natural borders facilitated movements between populations on the margins of the alluvium and those residing in the heartland, periodically bringing new ethnic groups to prominence. Yet in spite of these destabilizing forces, Babylonian civilization displayed a remarkable degree of continuity over the centuries due in large part to the ideological importance attached to the cities that dotted the Mesopotamian plain. Even after Hammurabi removed royal power to Babylon in the second quarter of the second millennium ac,' many cities retained economic and administrative importance and their temples continued to be centres of veneration where priests and scribes served the local gods and perpetuated scholarly traditions. The ideal Babylonian monarch organized the digging of canals to supply cities no longer served by the rivers and saw to it that temples were rebuilt following the outlines of their original foundations. 4 Kings took great pride in the palaces they inhabited, and the city wails that they maintained not only

Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection, ed. A. R. George, 2011

Orientalia 88, pp. 1-36, 2019

in: C. Tuplin (ed.), Persian responses. Political and Cultural Interaction with(in) the Achaemenid Empire, Swansea 2007: 163-76

Kasion 2 (Zaphon Münster), 2020

This paper deals with the possibility of retracing the monumental setting of ancient contexts now lost and not documented directly by the study of indirect sources that describe them, literally or visually. The assumption is that monuments that did not come down to the present day can nonetheless be studied and contextualized thanks to what is echoed in literary or epigraphic sources and to their depiction in other media. Here, the possibility that one or more now-lost statues representing the mušḫuššu, the serpo-dragon of Marduk, were erected at Babylon at least since the Late Babylonian period is discussed on the basis of both epigraphic and iconographic evidence.