Cuneiform writing in Neo-Babylonian Temple Communities

Archiv für Orientforschung 54 I Diplomatics of Late Babylonian Archival Texts, 2021

When Aramaic epigraphs on cuneiform tablets are approached from a diplomatic angle, several features of interest come to the fore. Among these are, for instance, the location of the epigraph on the clay tablet, its mode of writing, and its orientation compared to that of the cuneiform text. Moreover, for sealed documents it can be assessed how sealing practice – who has imprinted their seal, ring, or fingernail mark, and where? – relates to alphabetic texts added onto the same tablets. These various external qualities may be assessed for all Aramaic epigraphs contained on Babylonian clay tablets and plotted against axes such as types of Babylonian administrative and legal documents, region, and time. The present study, however, zooms in on a group of tablets from central Babylonia in order to arrive at a more specific appreciation of the emerging diplomatic patterns within the local socio-economic context. This in turn may shed light on questions regarding the reason behind and purpose of supplementing Babylonian documents with Aramaic notes.

Chronicles and the Priestly Literature of the Hebrew Bible, 2021

The basic question asked in this conference relates to how the priestly writings developed. This is a scribal question but one on which we have little information. The standard traditio-historical analysis is used by a number of papers in this volume, based on principles developed over a long time. The problem is that the results are hypothetical and depend on colleagues' accepting the result as plausible. What I want to do in this paper is go back to the basics and ask about what we can know about how scribes work. Can we support our traditio-historical results by actual evidence about how scribes carried out their duties? Thus, in order to throw light on how literature such as Chronicles and the priestly writings may have arisen, an important consideration is the duties of scribes and how they carried them out. Yet a perennial problem is that our actual knowledge of the detailed workings of the Jerusalem temple1 in practically any period is very small. On the other hand, scribes functioned in Egypt and Mesopotamian and also in Judah in the later Second Temple period. They also produced a great deal of literature that became conventional, if not canonical. This study will, first, assemble the few data that we have on scribes in the temple and, then, attempt to fill out the picture by cross-cultural comparisons with the work of scribes elsewhere in the ancient Near East. What happened in Judah can only be surmised, but surmise must be based on as much evidence as can be assembled. One important question is whether this literature is a scribal product, if there was widespread literacy. A recent study suggested that the military hierarchy was literate down to the level of quartermaster.2 This study invites a major discussion, 1 It is assumed here that the Jerusalem temple was probably the main place of worship and the location of the largest number of priests and scribes. Other temples also existed in pre-exilic times and are well catalogued for the Persian and Greek periods: Gerizim, Leontopolis, perhaps even Iraq al-Amir across the Jordan.

Zaphon, 2018

The book focuses on the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters dated to Nabopolassar and the first half of Nebuchadnezzar’s reigns (ca. 626–580 BCE); this is the formative phase of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The 215 letters in the corpus come from the two major Neo-Babylonian temple archives known today: Eanna, temple of Ištar, in Uruk (190 letters), and Ebabbar, temple of the son god Šamaš, in Sippar (25 letters). Two letters from Babylon are additionally included as appendices A and B (one of which is of the still crown prince Nebuchadnezzar from the battlefield at Harran). In many ways, these letters are the closest we get to the erratic drama which was day-to-day life in Babylonia at the mid first millennium BCE. The letters were a vital administrative tool, necessary for the ongoing functioning of these institutions. As such, they provide first-hand testimony for the tasks and obstacles that the Neo-Babylonian bureaucrats faced. As of yet, no systematic attempt has been made to date and contextualise the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters and they have never been studied as a group, and they are still one of the most underrepresented and underexploited source material in Neo-Babylonian studies. This is due to the lack of up-to-date editions, the “elusive nature” of epistolography (namely the difficulty in accurately dating and contextualising the letters), as well as the unique philological difficulties of the texts. Thus three interdependent goals stand at the base of this study: 1. Establishing new, up-to-date editions of the early Neo-Babylonian letters from Eanna and Ebabbar 2. Studying these letters as a distinct text group 3. Contextualising the letters The first part of this work, chapters 2–6, analyses the letters as a distinct text group with its own characteristics. The letters are examined both as a source for their authors’ sense of identity and mentality, as well as for the structure and administrative setting in which these authors were active. Following the introduction (chapter 1), which lays out the historical and scholarly basis for this study, chapter two examines the formal aspect of epistolography (e.g., structure and stock phrases). It then discuss two main methodological issues: the rhetorical analysis of the letters, and the problem of dating. In chapter three I discuss the “non-content” aspects of epistolography: viz. the language, the tablets themselves, and the logistics involved in epistolographic activity. At the core of the discussion chapters (2–6) stands chapter four, in which I examine aspects of officialdom in the temples. Following a discussion on the concepts of (good) service (maṣṣartu) and “administrative sin” (ḫīṭu), I go on to focus on the different interactions as revealed in the letters. Here, the slightly different administrative structure of the two temples, as well as substantial difference in their size, requires the distinction between Eanna and Ebabbar (the former naturally takes most of the focus). Starting with the inner interaction of temple officials with their colleagues within the same institution, the discussion then zooms out to examine the interaction of temple officials with other temples and state’s institutions. Chapter five surveys the main subject matters discussed in the letters, highlighting the contribution of the epistolographic perspective to the study of the temples’ day-to-day operation. In the sixth and concluding chapter of the discussion, a diachronic perspective is introduced, and the early Neo-Babylonian letter corpus is compared to the earlier Neo-Assyrian letters from the State Archive of Assyria (SAA), and to the later epistolographic material from the second half of the long sixth century (late Nabonidus and Achaemenid letters). The second part of the book, chapter seven, presents up-to-date editions of the 215 letters in the corpus. These include translation, transliteration, and contextual and philological commentary. Close attention is given to the contextualization of the letters; vis-à-vis dates, prosopography, and administrative and historical settings.

NABU, 2021

(JAPAN) 41) Miscellaneous notes on the Middle Babylonian documents-Previously, the Middle Babyloniann aklu documents were treated in my dissertation (Murai 2018). My further considerations, remarks less relevant to the main theme of my dissertation, I am including herein. 1)

This paper describes the demise of cuneiform, arguing that he final ‘tip’ into obsolescence came when the astronomical skills and astrological notions first developed in cuneiform, and which helped preserve the usefulness of that script for much longer than one would otherwise expect, were widely translated into cursive scripts. (Review Nature 455/23 2008, 1033-4.)

David Durand-Guédy and Jürgen Paul (eds), Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes, 2023

The present study focuses on multiple-text manuscripts compiled by scribes for their own use, based on royal monuments set up in temples and thus collectible, in this way, only for ancient scholars. However, these collections were more than mere copies of ancient relics: scribes studied these inscriptions in terms, not only of their contents, but also their palaeography, orthography, grammar and visual organization. All these interests can be discerned based on the collections preserved up to the present day on clay tablets.

… traditions: concepts of record-keeping in …, 2003

Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 2008

dans K. Radner et E. Robson (éd), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 752-773.

chapter 35 cu n eifor m cu ltu r e's l ast gua r di a ns: the old u r ba n nota bilit y of hellen istic u ru k philippe clancier

Iraq 64, 2002

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please order via email from [email protected], 2022

The scribes who wrote the documents in the Judaean archive were-to judge by their names, especially when a family name is used-native Babylonians. 218 Their work shows that they had mastered the cuneiform script beyond elementary level. Scribal art was taught at temple schools as excavations show: practice and exam tablets have been found, e.g., at the Nabû-ša-ḫarê temple in Babylon and elsewhere. 219 This allowed the sons of priestly families access to the career of scribe. Furthermore, there are many examples of businessmen who also occasionally wrote contracts. We have reason to believe that there were some people who could at least read and, with some effort, were able to write the rare record when there was no professional scribe available. 220 The art of writing could also be transmitted from father to son, as one tablet 218 This is also true for the scribe of the marriage contract A1, although this is challenged by the editor who believes he has a West Semitic name (Abraham 2005-2006: 215) but there is another possible reading of the name. Hackl 2017: 136, having studied the language of these texts in depth, comes to the conclusion that 'their patronyms and sometimes also (well-known) family or clan names suggest that they were indeed members of Babylonian families and thus of Babylonian extraction.' 219 See Gesche 2000. She reconstructed the curriculum and divided it into two levels, primary and advanced (both based on the elementary knowlege of cuneiform), followed, in the case of professionals and scholars, by higher education (see the diagram on p. 210). In the introductory stage future scribes started to get used to clay and reed by drawing single horizonal and vertical wedges, winkelhaken, signs composed of two to four wedges, then more complex signs. They also copied some examples of 'canonical' syllabary (S a) and vocabulary (S b A, S b) B) lists, followed by the god list Anum and ur 5-ra = ḫubullum. Most of the latter was already standardized during the Old-Babylonian period (pp. 66-80). In this way, the basic legal concepts were introduced. Non-standard texts include lists of personal names and their basic parts, e.g., verbal forms. It is observed that teachers preferred to introduce names in their unabriged form, even when a name does not occur in contemporary texts (pp. 81-102). This certainly improved the scribe's knowledge of Babylonian name forms and helped to streamline their orthography. In addition, the primary level also covered mathematical lists, measures and weights, date formulas, place names, administrative records, and letters, also a few proverbs and literary texts (pp. 136-152). Recently Frazer (2013) published a school text presumably from Nippur (UM 29-16-215(+)29-16-216.) It contains the typical mix of topics but in rev. ii (p. 179, middle column upper part ll. 8´-11´) there appear, immediately preceding the king's name Nazi-Maruttaš and its interpretation as Ṣil-Ninurta, after a few entirely broken lines, the remnants i]a-a-ma (or part of it), but never with a determinative in front. The restoration of a Yahwistic name seems obvious but as the text lacks a date it can be dated only vaguely to the Achaemenid period. Even if this may be proof for the introduction of an orthography for Hebrew names into the cuneiform curriculum, the evidence from our texts suggests that such a standardization by no means had happened before these texts were written. 220 See, e.g., the case of Ṭābia from the Nūr-Sîn family: He used to employ professional scribes for his business records but wrote himself when it came to giving instructions to his

Published in Wandering Arameans: Arameans Outside Syria. Textual and Archaeological Perspectives. Edited by A. Berlejung, A. M. Maeir and A. Schüle. LAOS 5 (2017), pp. 125-140.

The present book is the fourth volume in the ongoing publication of the cuneiform tablets in the Schøyen manuscript collection. 1 In 190 pages of text (xx + 170) and 63 plates, Andrew George offers editions of nineteen different texts written on twenty-one tablets in Old Babylonian Akkadian. The overwhelming majority of these texts are from "literary" genres (epic, myth, prayer, incantation, instruction, or riddle). The four exceptions, a diplomatic letter and three texts probably used for scribal training, show significant affinities with literary texts and were included in the volume because they have "much to tell us about literary creativity in Akkadian" (xv). The tablets published here add new witnesses to well-known works (e.g., the Gilgameš Epic and Atram-ḫ asīs) but also reveal many previously unknown compositions. Anyone interested in Akkadian literary and intellectual history will want to study this volume carefully. It adds significantly to the rather sparsely populated Old Babylonian Akkadian literary corpus 2 and provides new 1. See Jöran Friberg, A Remarkable Collection of Babylonian Mathematical Texts (Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences; New York: Springer, 2007); Bendt Alster, Sumerian Proverbs in the Schøyen Collection (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 2; Bethesda, Md.: CDL, 2007); and Stephanie Dalley, Babylonian Tablets from the First Sealand Dynasty in the Schøyen Collection (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 9; Bethesda, Md: CDL, 2009) for the previous three installments. Several more volumes are expected. 2. See Nathan Wasserman, Style and Form in Old Babylonian Literary Texts (Cuneiform Monographs 27; Köln: Styx; Leiden: Brill, 2003) for the most recent treatment of all known texts, including many not traditionally considered "literary," such as incantations.