The present collection of articles on disease in Babylonia is the first such volume to appear providing detailed information derived from published and unpublished medical texts in cuneiform script from the second and first millennia BC.

This book uses insights from religious studies, literary theory, and the history of science for understanding the Sumerian composition Nanse and the Birds in the context of the Old Babylonian scribal school. The discussions of Babylonian religion, literature, and scholarship focus on the usefulness and relevance of these modern concepts for categorizing the ancient text. The volume presents the first critical edition of Nanse and the Birds, as well as editions of the hymn Nanse B and all third millennium and Old Babylonian lexical lists of birds. It includes 37 plates with...

This study brings together the archaeological record and the pictorial documentation of ornamental wall painting produced in Assyria, from the thirteenth to the seventh centuries B.C. Nimrud, Khorsabad, Til Barsip, and Tell Sheikh Hamad, are among the ancient sites where impressive wall paintings were discovered; unfortunately most of these discoveries now exist in drawings and photographs only.
Ornamental wall painting created a colorful and meaningful visual impact to the rooms of residences belonging to the Assyrian kings. The assembled material demonstrates that the polychrome and...

This volume presents an edition of first-millennium BC Babylonian cuneiform texts that comprise Chapters 64 and 65 of the compendium of celestial omen texts dealing with the appearance and movements of the planet Jupiter. All are accompanied by an English translation. David Pingree has again provided an extensive introduction and astronomical commentary, in which he discusses the astronomical plausibility of the phenomena that are described in the omens. The textual material and its astronomical interpretation throws light on the extent of the Babylonian scholars' knowledge of astronomy and...

The articles represent the latest thinking of leading scholars in the field of Assyriology/Sumerology. Thirty-eight contributions cover the following subjects: history, divination, magic, religion, literature, prosopography, lexicography, and art. Some fifty texts are published and discussed for the first time.

This volume offers new cuneiform sources on the political, religious, juridical, and economic history of southern Babylonia in the nineteenth and early eighteenth centuries B.C.E. Among these texts is a 600-lines long document (no. 1) recording in unusual detail the daily routine followed in the temples of the city of Larsa and thus sheds light on the religious practices of the ancient Babylonians. Using this document as its point of departure, the first part of the book examines those practices - the service of the gods and the performance of the clergy. This document is especially important...

This volume, dedicated to H.L.J. Vanstiphout at the occasion of his retirement from the University of Groningen, July 14th 2006, demonstrates the broad variety of scholarly approaches to the study of ancient Sumerian literature. It contains contributions by Bendt Alster (Ninurta and the Turtle), Nicole Brisch (In Praise of the Kings of Larsa), A.J. Ferrara (A Hodgepodge of Snippets), Alhena Gadotti (Gilgames, Gudam and the Singer), W.W. Hallo (A Sumerian Apocryphon?), Dina Katz (Appeals to Utu), Jacob Klein (Man and His God), Piotr Michalowski (The Strange History of Tumal), Gonzalo Rubio...

This book contains an edition of an important Sumerian literary work, the 'Death of Gilgamesh' (am gal-e ba-nu), which was last published by the late S.N. Kramer, in 1944. An Iraqui excavation uncovered important new fragments in Meturan-Tall Haddad. These are published here for the first time. The Nippur fragments are published anew (introduction, commentary and French translation, with a chapter on Sumerian funerary texts and index).

The archive of the Egibi family from the 6th century BC originates in Babylon and covers a time span of more than 100 years and five generations. It is known as the largest and most important private archive from the Neo-Babylonian period. Although nearly 800 tablets were already published in cuneiform copies by the end of the 19th century, no comprehensive text edition and study of this archive has been completed so far. This book presents the first step and focuses on the purchase of land (date orchards and arable land) by the Egibi family. About 240 records (property titles and related...

The so-called Sumerian conjugation prefixes are the most poorly understood and perplexing elements of Sumerian verbal morphology. Approaching the problem from a functional-typological perspective and basing the analysis upon semantics, Professor Woods argues that these elements, in their primary function, constitute a system of grammatical voice, in which the active voice is set against the middle voice. The latter is represented by heavy and light markers that differ with respect to focus and emphasis. As a system of grammatical voice, the conjugation prefixes provided Sumerian speakers with...