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.