Cuneiform incantations present modern researchers with a conundrum. On the one hand, they appear to be texts spoken over an individual to heal and protect from harm, but on the other, they are written on clay tablets, a medium more associated with educated scribal literature. Inscribed amulets, however, provide examples of written incantations that clearly had a place in magical praxis. This article presents editions of four zi … pa₃ incantations from amulets—two of which are entirely new to scholarship—and uses these four texts as a test case for comparison with zi … pa₃ incantations from clay tablets. This comparison reveals that there are significant similarities between the amulet incantations and those from single incantation tablets and larger compendia, suggesting that there may be less of a divide between the Sumerian incantation tradition and actual magical praxis than is sometimes thought. At the same time, the variation among the amulet texts themselves and between the amulet texts and other early zi … pa₃ incantations indicates that the amulets are not copies or excerpts from precisely worded scripts but appear to be creative adaptations of basic forms and textual structures.

This paper offers an editio princeps of HS 1898, a Kassite exercise tablet containing an extract with ten liver omens followed by numeric tallies with the 10u-sign. The omens duplicate the fragmentary obverse of a Neo-Babylonian nīru-compendium, the reverse of which in turn replicated omens known from the fifteenth tablet of the bārûtu-series Pān tākalti and the unedited fragment from Nineveh. The student used complicated lexical and graphical variations in writing the technical term nīru, “the Yoke.”

In Hi ite arious erbs with a stem aku(u a)-/akuu ai-ha e been i enti eese inclu e the erb akuu aito see as well as three erbs o which the meaning is less e i ent: one (CHD aku(u a)-/akuu ai-A) re erring to a ty e o enalty one (CHD aku(u a)-/akuu ai-B) which is usually taken to mean to moisten ( ) or to soak( ) an one (CHD akuu ai-D) o which the meaning is unknown In this article it will be argue that the erbs aku(u a)-/akuu ai-A an B are actually one an the same erb with the meaning to lant to stab or to im ale is new inter retation not only eluci ates some thus ar o a ue a estations o the erb aku(u a)-/akuu ai-but also im ro es our un erstan ing o Hi ite cor oral unishments

Abstract The identity of the toponym Dugurasu, which is mentioned some fifty times in the ED IIIb documentation from Ebla, is a highly contested issue. While M. G. Biga had proposed an identificatio...

<p><span>It is generally thought that the Old Hittite Palace Chronicle was composed by Muršili I (reigned ca. 1620–1590 BCE) and that the anecdotes featuring in this composition thus took place during the reign of his predecessor Ḫattušili I (ca. 1650–1620 BCE). Recently, Forlanini proposed that the text’s author was not Muršili I but rather Ḫattušili I, who tells about the times of his predecessor Labarna I (ca. 1680(?)–1650 BCE). In the present article it will be argued that both views are difficult to maintain. Instead, six arguments will be presented that rather indicate that the Palace Chronicle may have been authored by Anitta, king of Nēša (reigned ca. 1740–1725 BCE), and that the composition recounts the reign of Anitta’s father Pitḫāna, with some anecdotes even dating back to the times before Pitḫāna’s conquest of the city of Nēša, i.e. before 1750 BCE.</span><br></p>

Abstract The tablet Si. 427 demonstrates that diagonal triples, or Pythagorean triples as they are now known, were used by Old Babylonian surveyors to construct perpendicular field boundaries accura...

The proposal is here offered to read the Ugaritic administrative text RS 10.052 iv 1 as containing the personal name pǵmw, the Ugaritic writing of the Luwian name Piḫamuwa.

The Yale Babylonian Collection contains a partial cylinder, NBC 2511, that preserves a hitherto unknown example of Esarhaddon’s Uruk B inscription. While this exemplar does not deviate in translation from those already published in RINAP 4, there are some orthographic variations. This article presents an edition of NBC 2511 with some comments regarding its differences from the published exemplars and its parallels with other Esarhaddon Uruk cylinders.