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Old Babylonian tablets from Nineveh; and possible pieces of early Gilgamesh Epic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Stephanie Dalley
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Extract

The cuneiform tablets in the British Museum published here come from Old Babylonian Nineveh. A tablet from the Ashmolean Museum is also published here because its contents, reminiscent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, seem to link it with some of the British Museum fragments. Despite the fact that it was registered in the same year, the Ashmolean tablet almost certainly does not come from Nineveh, as the ductus is entirely different, and so is the clay. According to the sequence of numbers to which it belongs, the most likely findspot is Kish.

The tablet fragments and flakes numbered BM 134537 A–I and 134538 probably all belong to a single, very large tablet of the Old Babylonian period. They are written in Old Babylonian script quite similar to that of the letters from Tell al Rimah, and distinct from the script of Sippar. They were found by Campbell Thompson in the temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, together with other fragments which include a possibly bilingual text, and three letters.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 63 , 2001 , pp. 155 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2001

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References

1 The writer is grateful to Julian Reade for suggesting that she work on them, to Christopher Walker for contributing his preliminary copies of some of them, and for useful discussions. They are published here by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

2 Published here by kind permission of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

3 See Dalley, and Yoffee, , Old Babylonian Texts in the Ashmolean Museum. Texts from Kish and elsewhere. Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts XIII, Oxford 1991Google Scholar. Since there was no internal or external evidence to connect the tablet with Kish, the tablet was not published there, but will be included in the forthcoming OECT volume edited by Dalley, Robson and Breckwoldt, which will complete publication of all cuneiform tablets to date in the Ashmolean Museum.

4 Reade, J. E., “Archaeology and the Kuyunjik archives”, in CRAI Leiden 1983, Cuneiform Archives and Libraries (1986), ed. Veenhof, K. R., p. 214Google Scholar.

5 Lambert, W. G. and Millard, A. R., Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum, second supplement (London 1968)Google Scholar: “Old Babylonian script. Unidentified”, findspot Ishtar Temple. Dimensions for this and the other OB 1932-12-12 tablets are given in that catalogue.

6 Catalogue: “Sumerian text?”, no findspot.

7 Catalogue: “Old Babylonian script. Unidentified”, no findspot.

8 Catalogue: “Old Babylonian script. Probably a letter”, findspot Ishtar temple. Not worth copying. Attempts to join it were unsuccessful.

9 Catalogue: “Old Babylonian script. Letter”, no findspot.

10 Catalogue: “Old Babylonian script. Letter”, findspot Ishtar temple.

11 Catalogue: “Old Babylonian script. Letter”, findspot Ishtar temple.

12 Catalogue: “Flakes, probably belonging to the same tablet as 134538”, findspot Ishtar temple.

13 Catalogue: “Old Babylonian script. Letter?”, findspot Ishtar temple.

14 Hand-catalogue: “contract?”.

15 Thompson, R. Campbell and Hamilton, R. W., “The British Museum excavations on the temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, 1930–1931”, Liverpool Annals of Art and Archaeology 19 (1932), 105–7Google Scholar.

16 Grayson, A. K., Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods I (Toronto 1987), A.O.39.2Google Scholar.

17 Walker, C. B. F., “The Šamši-Adad I inscription from Nineveh”, Annual Review of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project 2 (1984), 21Google Scholar.

18 George, A. R., “Cuneiform texts in the Birmingham City Museum”, Iraq 41 (1979), 132–3 No. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Dijk, J., LUGAL UD ME-LAM-bi NIR-AL (Leiden 1983), ll. 51–3 (MS C5)Google Scholar.

19 With the help of Christopher Walker the writer compared these BM fragments with the “Sippar” Old Babylonian tablet BM 96974, which has larger script but is a similar kind of large, flaked-surface tablet, to which the Nineveh fragments appear to belong. They certainly do not belong to the same tablet.

20 See now Reade, J. E., “Ninive (Nineveh)”, in RIA 95/6 (2000), section 8, on pre-Assyrian historyGoogle Scholar.

21 Details given by Whiting, R. M., “Tiš-atal of Nineveh and Babati, uncle of Šu-Sin”, JCS 28 (1976), 173–82Google Scholar. Two seals naming a Tish-atal are illustrated in Collon, D., First Impressions — Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East (London 1987), Nos. 121–2Google Scholar.

22 BIN 3 328 ll. 8–10, and Kang, SACT 1 No. 172 ll. 16 ff.

23 Wilcke, C., “A note on Ti'amat-bašti and the goddess Ša(w)uš(k)a of Nineveh”, Drevnii Vostok 5 (1988), 225–7Google Scholar.

24 Durand, J.-M., in Mémoires de NABU 4 = Florilegium Marianum III, Recueil d'études… M. T. Barrelet (Paris 1997), 47Google Scholar; S. Dalley et al, The Old Babylonian Tablets from Tell Al Rimah, No. 200: 6; for Ninet as a form of Nineveh, see Yuhong, Wu, NABU 1994, 38Google Scholar.

25 Salvini, M., “Un royaume hourrite en Mesopotamie du Nord à l'époquede Hattusili I”, Subartu IV (1998), 305–11Google Scholar. Hittite and other evidence for Ishtar of Nineveh is presented by Beckman, G., “Ishtar of Nineveh reconsidered”, JCS 50 (1998), 1–10Google Scholar.

26 Sollberger, E., “Samsu-iluna's bilingual inscriptions C and D”, RA 63 (1969), 29–43, especially p. 36Google Scholar. Year-names attributable to Iluni are listed by Charpin, D., “Iluni, roi d'Ešnunna”, N.A.B.U. 1998, 29Google Scholar.

27 Guichard, M., N.A.B.U. 1994, 74Google Scholar.

28 See George, A., The Epic of Gilgamesh (Allen Lane: Penguin 1999), 139–40Google Scholar. It is due to be published by D. Arnaud.

29 Alster, B., Proverbs of Ancient Sumer (Bethesda 1997)Google Scholar.

30 A tablet possibly from Ur has the year name MU Iluni LUGAL, according to Charpin, D., BiOr 38 (1981), 534Google Scholar.

31 I would like to thank Dr J. Black and Dr G. Zólyomi for making available to me a Sumerian text of “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven” from the Sumerian Literature Electronic Corpus, which originates from J. Krecher and incorporates information from the edition of Cavigneaux, A. and Al-Rawi, F., “Gilgameš et Taureau de Ciel”, RA 87 (1993), 97–129Google Scholar. However, no useful comparisons were found, which implies that this version from Nineveh cannot be linked closely with the Sumerian story.