Pp. 3–26: “A Campaign of Southern City-States against Kiš as Documented in the ED IIIa Sources from Šuruppak (Fara),” by Piotr Steinkeller

A group of ED IIIa texts from Šuruppak (Fara) describes a mobilization of troops from Uruk, Adab, Nippur, Lagaš, Umma, and Šuruppak, clearly in anticipation of a major military operation. It is argued that the target of that campaign, which was led by Uruk, was the city-state of Kiš. The analysis of various other sources further suggests that, during the ED IIIa period, Uruk was able to bring significant portions of southern Babylonia under its control. This development was a reversal of the situation existing in ED I and II, when much of that region remained under the hegemony of Kiš.

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Pp. 27-52: “A Sargonic Exercise Tablet Listing ‘Places of Inanna’ and Personal Names,” by Jana Matuszak and Hanan Abd Alhamza Alessawe

This article publishes a remarkable school tablet, probably from Sargonic Umma, which contains two lexical exercises. While the reverse appears to be an ad hoc list of personal names, many of which start with or contain the sign a, the obverse compiles “places” (ki) where certain mythological events involving the goddess Inanna had occurred. Unusually for lexical lists, each of these places is described in a complete sentence following a loosely alternating structure, which gives the list almost literary qualities. After discussing the list-like vs. literary features and comparing the compilation of places to a similar lexical fragment of Ur III date and the Early Dynastic Word List F, we analyze the mythological allusions and potential ritual associations.

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Pp. 53-101: “Sumerian Model Contracts from the Old Babylonian Period in the Arkeoloji Müzeleri of Istanbul,” by Gabriella Spada and William W. Hallo

This article presents twenty fragmentary multicolumn tablets containing Sumerian model contracts from Old Babylonian Nippur, which are currently kept at the Arkeoloji Müzeleri in Istanbul, Turkey. Initial work on these was initiated by the late William W. Hallo in 1971 but he was unable to complete the project so it was taken over and completed by Gabriella Spada. Their content is limited to loan contracts of silver or barley, sometimes with the presence of antichretic pledges (slaves, fields, gardens, and lumps of silver).

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Pp. 103-126: “The Manchester Tammuz,” by Dylan Guerra and Niek Veldhuis

This contribution provides a new edition of the Manchester Tammuz, a sequence of Emesal love songs concerning Inana and Dumuzi. The text offers many irregular spellings, some of which may be resolved by means of a fragmentary duplicate from Nippur. The relationship between the Manchester text and several other Old Babylonian Emesal liturgies that share characteristics of orthography, paleography, and layout is discussed briefly. A line-drawing of the object by Theophilus G. Pinches, published in 1904, is added to the end of the article.

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Pp. 127-161: “Old Babylonian Lunar-Eclipse Omen Tablets in the British Museum,” by Andrew George and Junko Taniguchi

This article presents a first edition of four clay tablets inscribed with omens arising from eclipses of the moon. As products of the middle and late Old Babylonian periods they represent the oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered and thus provide important new information about celestial divination among the peoples of southern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium BCE. The tablets are edited with appended philological apparatus. They are all found to bear witness to a single text, which organizes the omens of lunar eclipse by time of night, movement of shadow, duration, and date. A composite translation also takes account of two other early versions of the text published eleven years ago. The article is concluded by discussions of variants and scribal annotations in the text. The cuneiform texts are illustrated by scale drawings of the tablets.

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Pp. 163-183: “30 − 1 = 30: Old Babylonian Month Lengths, the Finale?,” by Michel Tanret

The Old Babylonian administrative calendar always consisted of thirty days, regardless of early moon sightings. The ud.da.gíd.da days, viewed by some as days to be excluded due to an early moon sighting, were not used to shorten the month; rather, they denoted the number of days when no rations were distributed. This is demonstrated on the basis of Old Babylonian documentary texts.

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Pp. 185-190: “Hittite ^UZUmu/aḫḫ(a)r(a)i– ‘Flesh of the Thigh, Ham,'” by H. Craig Melchert

Hittite ^UZUmu/aḫḫ(a)r(a)i– is a body part belonging to various mammals, including humans, but almost exclusively attested as a component of cooked meat offerings to deities. New evidence supports its identification as the fleshy part of the thigh, thus English “ham” in the anatomical sense, but when served as food in Hittite removed from the thigh bone. A recent text join furnishes not only a further instance of juxtaposition with the expression for “thigh bone,” but also the crucial detail that the m. is skewered before being cooked.

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Pp. 191-197: “Once Again on the Distribution of Cuneiform Luwian =ša/za,” by Zsolt Simon

This article argues that the Cuneiform Luwian nominal particle =ša/za was not assigned on a word-by-word basis in the -r-, -r/n-, -l-stem classes but followed a regular pattern, thus Jasanoff’s rule of the distribution of this particle can be extended and confirmed.

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Pp. 199-220: “The Middle Assyrian Funerary Inscriptions,” by Jacob Jan de Ridder

This article presents revised editions of a group of four similar funerary inscription from Assyria, dating to about the thirteenth century BCE. The paleography of these texts is unusual, characterized by similarities with the writing from Tell Taban and the kingdom of Ḫana. However, the invocation of the Hurrian deity Šuriḫa, the patron of the town of Šūru, suggests this ancient settlement as its provenance. These funerary inscriptions would be among the earliest texts from the Middle Assyrian settlement that existed at this location.

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Pp. 221-227: “Zanua, the Carpet-Maker: Urartian CTU 4 CB An-1 Revisited,” by Yervand Grekyan

Evidence of Urartian textiles is mostly limited to pictorial representations, along with a few textual references and finds of fragments of textiles in archaeological contexts. The study of an Urartian royal letter gives some new idea on craftsmen who wove textiles in Urartu.

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