The article presents a previously unknown hymn in praise of Marduk, the Esagil, Babylon and the Babylonians. It contains unparalleled descriptions of the healing powers of Marduk, the splendor of Babylon, the spring borne by the Euphrates to the city’s fields and the generosity of the Babylonians themselves. The text survives in 20 manuscripts, from the 7th to the 2nd/1st centuries BCE, and it can be shown that it was a fixture in the school curriculum of the time. The author of this highly accomplished piece immortalized his devotion to his city, gods, and people in words that resonated until the final decades of cuneiform culture.

Edition with translation of a Sumerian liturgical fragment kept today in Birmingham City Museum. Three such fragments were edited in a previous article (Iraq 85). The fourth fragment tells us a dramatic story of Dumuzi in the steppe, which, thanks to the help of loving women and of the gods Utu and Nanna, finds a happy end.

The article reconstructs lines 75–80 of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgameš. It offers a re-edition of all the extant sources and uses as a recourse verses 9–12 in Chapter 4 of the Book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). It then demonstrates how close the passage in the Epic of Gilgameš and the verses of the Book of Qohelet are. The article concludes with a brief discussion about the relationship between the Epic of Gilgameš and the Book of Qohelet.

This article presents the preliminary results of investigations at the site of Qach Rresh on the Erbil Plain of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, conducted by the Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia project (RLIIM). The site of Qach Rresh is estimated to have been founded in the mid–eighth century B.C.E., at the height of the Assyrian Empire, and continued to be utilised in varying capacity until the onset of the Hellenistic period (c. 320 B.C.E.). Magnetic gradiometry survey and excavations currently suggest that Qach Rresh served as a rural administrative/storage center during the Assyrian Empire, which fell into disrepair following the empire’s collapse. The following post-Assyrian/Iron Age III period then saw several of its large buildings repurposed as refuse areas containing debris from largely domestic contexts. Qach Rresh is the first rural settlement investigated within the Assyrian imperial heartland. The results from this project seem to indicate a high degree of Assyrian state or elite involvement in the countryside, serving as a critical first foray into assessing the relationship between urban governing centers and their “hinterlands”.

The gesture of the pointing finger performed by the Assyrian king and, sometimes, his officials and depicted on several monuments is commonly labelled by scholars as ubāna tarāṣu (to extend the finger and point), and variously interpreted as a gesture of homage, or prayer, or adoration to the deities. The article questions this generally accepted reading and proposes to interpret the pointing finger gesture as a simple deictic gesture, thus deprived of any religious connotation. It is concluded that the gesture had not intrinsic meaning but was intentionally used to point at and highlight important elements outside the monument or within the carved inscription or the image.

This paper unfolds in three steps. First it draws attention to how the import of Babylonian and Assyrian belles lettres can be affected by the manner in which the utterances are ‘voiced’. Second, it highlights interruption as a particular instance of this, proposing cases where characters are likely to be interrupting each other (the first treatment of this issue in Assyriology). Finally, it argues that the distribution of speech formulae in Gilgameš associates one such formula with interruption and aggression more than another.

The paper posits a link between the Standard Babylonian Version of Nergal and Ereškigal and the Jacob Cycle in Genesis (Gen 25-35), one anchored by the former story’s cosmic stairway and the stairway with its top in heaven appearing to Jacob in his famous dream. It is argued that the proper understanding of the motive for that specific parallel opens the door to a considerably broader one, which offers important insight on the two traditions. This broader parallel informs on different aspects of Nergal and Ereškigal, including theological and historical issues that appear to stand behind that story. Such contact, it is suggested, challenges established Assyriological thinking about the place of comparative perspectives in the study of Mesopotamian literature.

Who created literary texts in ancient Mesopotamia, and did the Mesopotamians have a concept of “literature” (→ 1)? A core witness is the song Innana B / nin me šara (NMS → 2). New translations and an inductive analysis of references to text, addressee, and speaker reveals NMS to be created by a priestess for a war ritual (→ 3). Instead of staking a claim to authorship, however, the song stresses a claim for priesthood (→ 4). New evidence shows why: the creators of ritual songs are gods, and En-ḫedu-ana is only allowed to create such a song when she herself acts as a priestess embodying a deity (→ 5 and 6). The last section will offer proof that NMS belongs to the category of literature, from both ancient and modern perspectives, and explain why it is also to be regarded as both a mythic and ritual text (→ 7).The analysis demonstrates the birth of literature through the goddess Nin-gal, embodied in En-ḫedu-ana.

This paper publishes the editio princeps of an Early Dynastic IIIb tablet from Nippur, which contains a unique yet fragmentary Sumerian narrative about the storm god Iškur’s captivity in the netherworld, from which he appears to be rescued by Fox. While the incomplete state of preservation prevents a reconstruction of the plot, individual motifs can be traced across the entire cuneiform corpus, allowing for a preliminary case study of continuity and change over more than two millennia of Mesopotamian mythological literature.

Excavations carried out between 2016 and 2022 on the main mound (Mound A) of Tell Zurghul/Nigin, in Areas D and E, have revealed a long occupational sequence of the site during a large part of the third millennium B.C.E. The identification of three main phases of use of the area, which are in turn divided into five Architectural Phases, shows that the mound was utilized in different ways between the late Early Dynastic I period and the end of the third millennium B.C.E. The sequence allows the various phases of use to be associated with specific periods in the life of the settlement, coinciding with the rulers of the First Dynasty of Lagash and Gudea’s works on the site. The chrono-typological analysis of the pottery repertoire from Areas D and E has established dating for the materials recovered and provides additional information useful for a general reassessment of the ceramic chronology of third millennium B.C.E. Mesopotamia. Materials from Architectural Phases I and II are assigned at the ceramic level to the late Akkadian/post-Akkadian/early Ur III horizon. Pottery from Architectural Phases III and IV are assigned, respectively, to the ED IIIB/early Akkadian and the ED IIIA–B horizons, while materials from Architectural Phase V are assigned to a late ED I/transitional ED I–ED IIIA horizon.

In 2019, three fragments of terracotta nails were discovered at the site of Amyan (Kurdistan region of Iraq, Duhok Governorate), probably dated to the second half of the second millennium B.C. Typologically unprecedented, they nonetheless belong to the well-known category of nails found throughout Mesopotamia and Susiana, dating from the fourth to first millennia B.C. This article publishes the nails from Amyan and also contextualises them by comparing them to other terracotta nails found in northern Mesopotamia and dated to the second half of the second millennium B.C. By doing so, I ultimately propose an initial typology of these objects.

Edition with translation of three Sumerian liturgical fragments kept today in Birmingham City Museum. In themselves they are hardly significant, but once put back into their material context, i.e. joined to fragments kept in other museums, and once compared to their literary parallels, they start to become interpretable. The first fragment may come from Larsa, while the others belong to tablets kept in Berlin, partially published in 1913 by Zimmern in his Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler 2, whose origin is admittedly Sippir. The first fragment is part of a vast liturgy of the goddess Ninisina. The two following fragments are from two different tablets both containing a liturgy of Enlil which can now be almost entirely reconstructed. A further fragment is edited in a following article.

Rabana-Merquly was a major regional centre of the Parthian era in the central Zagros highlands. This article explores the hypothesis that the Rabana intramural settlement was in part a ‘sanctuary’ devoted to the ancient Persian water goddess Anahita, based upon extensive architectural augmentations around an ephemeral waterfall, combined with the nearby construction of a probable fire altar. Two jar burials excavated in 2022 inside an adjacent building show this complex also functioned as a mausoleum. Carbon-14 dating of these cremation deposits supports occupation of the site during the second to first centuries B.C. Twin rock reliefs at the entrances to Rabana-Merquly indicate that the fortress was likely associated with the ruling dynasty of Adiabene, a vassal kingdom of the Parthian (or Arsacid) Empire in north-east Mesopotamia. A further link to Natounissarokerta/Natounia on the Kapros is suggested by the iconography of that city's coinage, which features an obverse image of a goddess, potentially a hybrid representation of Anahita-Tyche.