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UET 6, 124 = U 16900E CDLI P346209 Lamentation over Sumer and Ur 1f., Michalowski MC 1, source BB, Attinger La lamentation sur Sumer et Ur (2.2.3) obverse 1. ud šu bal ke3 -de3 [...]-lam? -e-de3 In order to overturn the day, in order to destroy the plans 2. ud -de3 mar-rux(TE)-gin7 [...] x-gu7-e The storm ravages like a stormwind 3. me ki -en-gi-ra šu bal ke3-de3 In order to overturn the cosmic powers of Sumer 4. bal sag9-ga e2 -ba gi4-gi4-de3 In order to confine the good reign in its house 5. iri gul -gul-u3-de3 e2 gul-gul-u3-de3 In order to destroy the city, in order to destroy the temple 6. tur3 gul-gul-u3-de3 amaš tab-tab-be2-de3 In order to destroy the cattlepen, in order to flatten the sheepfold 7. gud-bi tur3-bi-a nu-gub-bu-de3 So that the ox does not does not stand in its cattlepen 8. udu-bi amaš-bi-a nu-daĝal-e-de3 So that the sheep does not expand (in number?) in its sheepfold 9. id2-bi a mun4-na tum3-u3-de3 So that the canal irrigates with (only) brackish water 10. gan2-ne2 zid-de3 u2 hirim mu2-mu2-de3 So that hirin grass grows in the fertile field 11. eden-e u2 a-nir mu2-mu2-de3 So that the "lamentation plant" grows in the plain 12. ama dumu-ni-ir ki nu-kiĝx-kiĝx(UR4-UR4)-de3 So that the mother does not seek the whereabouts of her child 13. ad-da a dam-ĝu10 nu-di-de3 So that the father does not say "ah, my wife" 14. dam banda3 ur2-ra nu-hul2-le-de3 So that the junior spouse does not delight in (his) lap 15. TUR-TUR dub3-ba nu-buluĝ3-ĝe26-e-de3 So that the little ones do not grow on the knee 16. emeda da -e u5-a nu-di-de3 So that the nursemaid does not sign a lullaby 17. nam-lugal-la ki -tuš-bi kur2 -ru-de3 So that the dwelling of kingship is changed 18. eš-bar kiĝx(UR4)-ĝa2 [...]-e-de3 In order to paralyze/actively diminish(?) decision making note: For the debated meaning of eš-bar kiĝ₂ (... dug₄), see Attinger ELS, 508, Steinkeller RAI 60, 8-9.

The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, the Fragmentarium has now reached the size of 21,200 cuneiform tablets, totalling over 300,000 lines of text. Secondly, the Corpus has been greatly enlarged with editions of several texts, such as the Hymn to Ninurta as Savior, the Great Prayer to Nabû, and particularly the Epic of Gilgameš. Thirdly, a sophisticated string-alignment algorithm, based on the python-alignment library, has been fine-tuned for cuneiform script and implemented. The algorithm has been run several times, and has found several matchings that had escaped the attention of humans, such as a new fragment of the latest datable manuscript of Gilgameš edited in no. 27, text no. 2. The growth of the manuscript base of texts is important in its own right, but it also has a larger significance for the understanding of Mesopotamian literature, since it contributes decisively to its contextualization. The importance of recovering the context in a tradition in which the authors of most texts are still unknown, and indeed in which the date of composition of almost all works of literature is impossible to establish, can hardly be overstated. In this respect, the pièce de résistance of this collection is constituted by T. Mitto's new edition of the Catalogue of Texts and Authors (no. 26). The edition is informed by several new fragments and includes two pieces of a hitherto unsuspected 190 Enrique Jiménez et al. 35. BM 38873: A Parallel Fragment to Kiutu M, Beatrice Baragli 76 and Daisuke Shibata BM 38873 is a small fragment written in Neo-Babylonian script that belongs to the Babylon Collection of the British Museum. Its text was described by Leichty-Finkel-Walker (2019, 405) as a "bilingual incantation". Its obverse preserves eight lines of a bilingual text, while its reverse contains the remains of a colophon. T. Mitto identified the fragment as a close parallel to a manuscript of Kiutu M from Nineveh (Baragli 2022, 367-372). The preserved sections are almost identical with Kiutu M 3-6, although obv. 2'-5' of its text slightly differs from it. However, obv. 2'-5' of the fragment also partially parallel TCL 6 53 obv. 5-6, a prayer to Anu from Hellenistic Uruk, which was composed using materials from various older prayers and shares at least its opening section with Kiutu M. 77 The phrases in obv. 6'-9' of this fragment are, however, missing from this prayer to Anu. As indicated by these parallels, the prayer in BM 38873 is either a variant of the Nineveh version of Kiutu M or another Sumerian prayer belonging to the corpus of the "healer" (āšipūtu) that has certain lines in common with Kiutu M. Due to the fragmentary state of the tablet, a final decision must be postponed until further pieces are discovered. Until now, only one manuscript of Kiutu M has been found in the Kuyunjik collection. Kiutu M has been suggested to be the Kiutu of the first "house" of the Bīt rimki ritual; however, the available information is insufficient for such an assumption (Baragli 2022, 368-369). If BM 38873 is another manuscript of Kiutu M, this would attest the presence of this Kiutu also in southern Mesopotamia. Transliteration 76. B. Baragli's contribution was written with the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The authors are grateful to K. Simkó for collating individual signs of the tablet. 77. D. Shibata is preparing a new edition and study of TCL 6 53, to be published in a volume edited by B. Baragli and U. Gabbay.

BM 120015 is an unpublished interlinear Sumero-Akkadian personal prayer, an Old Babylonian version of the first-millennium prayer known as gi-izi-lá gùr-ru “(I am) carrying a torch”. In what follows, we refer to BM 120015 as the OB version of the prayer, while the first-millennium manuscripts (all from Nineveh) constitute the FM version. In the Introduction (I), we discuss the orthography and grammar of the Akkadian and the Sumerian text of the prayer and analyze its content. The edition and translation of the OB version, accompanied by a philological commentary, come next (II). In the Discussion (III), we outline the multifarious changes that occurred in the transmission of the prayer from the second millennium to the first millennium – both in the Sumerian and in the Akkadian versions. The function of the imprints of fingernails found on the OB tablet is also examined

Y. Porath, U. ‘Ad and ‘A. al-S. Sa‘id, The Nahal Tanninim Dam and Its Vicinity. Final Report of the 2000–2006 Excavation Seasons (IAA Reports 71), Jerusalem 2023, pp. 255–260

Kaskal 18, 2021

Prayer gi-izi-lá gùr-ru 'Carrying a torch' According to New Fragments and Joins", Uri Gabbay The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL)'s Fragmentarium has continued to grow in the year 2021: it currently contains transliterations of ca. 19,500 cuneiform tablets, totalling over 268,000 lines of text. The Corpus has also been considerably expanded since the last instalment of the series, and critical editions of compositions such as Anzû, the Poor Man of Nippur, the Theodicy, and the Cuthaean Legend of Narām-Sîn have now been prepared. All these editions are informed by a multiplicity of new fragments, identified in the depths of the Fragmentarium, whose publication in print is the chief goal of this series. The note by T. Mitto (no. 19) now almost doubles the manuscript basis of the Cuthaean Legend, and reveals the existence of several Late Babylonian copies of it. The article by Zs. J. Földi (no. 20) contains no fewer than thirteen new pieces of the Counsels of Wisdom; that by G. Rozzi (no. 21), six new manuscripts of the Great Šamaš Hymn, two of them with new excerpts of Enūma eliš. Some of the new identifications reveal the existence of unsuspected or variant versions of well-known texts: thus, the article by A. C. Heinrich and E. Jiménez (no. 17), publishes the first two hitherto known excerpts of Anzû on Neo-Babylonian school tablets, whose existence reveals that the epic was more popular in post-Assyrian times than the previously known material suggested. Similarly, the remains of the Ninevite version of the Poor Man of Nippur published by A. C. Heinrich (no. 18) differs in some key points from the previously known version from Huzirina. From The Electronic Babylonian Literature Lab 16-24 161 for their use in the Fragmentarium. As in the previous instalments, all articles have been read by all team members. In addition, B.R. Foster has updated his translations of several works of Akkadian literature for their use by the eBL project, which has resulted in a finer understanding of many of the passages cited here. We would like to thank the editorial team of KASKAL, in particular L. Milano, P. Corò, and S. Ermidoro, for the continuous support of this series and expert technical assistance. New tablets are published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

The compilation of the Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL)'s Corpus and its Fragmentarium has continued at a good pace since the publication of the previous installment of the series. The Fragmentarium contains, as of February 2021, transliterations of ca. 17,500 fragments, totaling over 215,000 lines of text. The electronic critical editions of several major texts, such as Enūma eliš, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, the Counsels of Wisdom, and the Catalogue of Texts and Authors are now finished or nearly so. New pieces of all these texts have been identified and will be gradually published in this series. The present installment contains new fragments of Gilgameš (n. 10), Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (n. 11), the Hymn to the Queen of Nippur (n. 12), and a literary hymn to a god (n. 13). Beginning in this installment, articles stemming from work in the Fragmentarium, but not directly related to the core corpus of the eBL project, will be included. The first such article, by J. Peterson and T. Mitto, deals with the text Enlil and Sud (n. 14). The second, by U. Gabbay, presents a new reconstruction of a ritual prescribing the recitation of sundry Balaĝs and Erša~uĝas (n. 15). The articles have been read by all team members, an exercise that has resulted in many suggestions and corrections. New tablets are published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. *** Almost every non-administrative document in the range BM 30000 to BM 36696 has been transliterated in the eBL's Fragmentarium, enabling hundreds of identifications and dozens of joins 232 Enrique Jiménez et al. to be discovered. Some of the discoveries originating from these works are published here, in notes nn. 10 (Gilgameš) and 14 (Enlil and Sud). As originally planned, a list of fragments identified and/or joined in the framework of the eBL project would have been published in this installment. The list, numbering over 4,000 identified fragments and ca. 650 proposed joins, has been compiled, but the impossibility of checking most of the joins in the museum due to the pandemic has recommended that the publication be delayed until such tests are again possible. It is a pleasure to acknowledge here our debt to two colleagues who, in the last year, have granted us access to their collections of transliterations, the fruits of many years of painstaking work: U. Gabbay and A.R. George. We would also like to express our gratitude to the editor of this journal for his continuous support throughout the last year.

The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, the Fragmentarium has now reached the size of 21,200 cuneiform tablets, totalling over 300,000 lines of text. Secondly, the Corpus has been greatly enlarged with editions of several texts, such as the Hymn to Ninurta as Savior, the Great Prayer to Nabû, and particularly the Epic of Gilgameš. Thirdly, a sophisticated string-alignment algorithm, based on the python-alignment library, has been fine-tuned for cuneiform script and implemented. The algorithm has been run several times, and has found several matchings that had escaped the attention of humans, such as a new fragment of the latest datable manuscript of Gilgameš edited in no. 27, text no. 2. The growth of the manuscript base of texts is important in its own right, but it also has a larger significance for the understanding of Mesopotamian literature, since it contributes decisively to its contextualization. The importance of recovering the context in a tradition in which the authors of most texts are still unknown, and indeed in which the date of composition of almost all works of literature is impossible to establish, can hardly be overstated. In this respect, the pièce de résistance of this collection is constituted by T. Mitto's new edition of the Catalogue of Texts and Authors (no. 26). The edition is informed by several new fragments and includes two pieces of a hitherto unsuspected 106 Enrique Jiménez et al. Babylonian version of it, which shows that the Catalogue, or a composition akin to it, circulated in Babylonia in the last few centuries before the turn of the eras. Even more important for the recovery of the context of Babylonian literature are the newly established identifications of several of the incipits given in the Catalogue: the progress made since the last critical edition of the text (Lambert 1962) is considerable. New authors can now be recovered from oblivion, and their oeuvre studied in some detail. Three compositions, all of them identifiable, can now be credited to the scholar Rīmūt-Gula (Mitto, no. 25), a fact that allows us, perhaps for the first time, to study the style of a Babylonian author across several of his works. The new sections of the Catalogue, together with several new textual discoveries, afford us a context also for the Great Hymn to Ištar: it was probably authored, according to the Babylonian tradition, by the elusive scholar Aba-Ninnu-dari (Jiménez-Rozzi, no. 32), homonymous or perhaps identical with the scholar called AΒiqar in the Uruk List of Kings and Sages. New readings of old manuscripts also provide evidence for a possible serialization of Bullussa-rabi's Hymn to Gula in first-millennium Babylonia (Földi, no. 31). *** More fragments are identified almost daily, so inevitably some of the notes edited in previous instalments of this series need be supplemented. A. Hätinen adds several new fragments of Ludlul (no. 28) to the already published ones in Hätinen 2020 and in the introduction to the third instalment. G. Rozzi edits additional fragments of the Great Šamaš Hymn (no. 29), to be added to those that appeared in the preceding collection (Rozzi 2021b). Zs. J. Földi furthers the textual basis of Bullussarabi's Gula Hymn (no. 30), thus continuing the labor started in Földi 2019b. *** From the Electronic Babylonian Literature Lab 25-35 185 34. Further Kiutu Fragments and Joins, Beatrice Baragli 75 The Kiutu incantation-prayers addressed to Utu are a group of Sumerian texts that describe the movement of the sun in the sky or of a cultic divine statue on earth. The eBL team, in particular Zs. J. Földi, has identified some new fragments during the final revision phase of the main edition of this corpus (Baragli 2022); however due to time constraints they could not be included in it (see the Addenda, ibid. 642). They are therefore edited here. 1) The new join K.17907+ (Kiutu br 6) The small fragment K.17907 joins K.5680+, a manuscript of the Kiutu of the sixth "house" of the Bīt rimki ritual (Nin5 in Baragli 2022, 511). The present fragment contains the remains of 4 lines, whose endings none of the known manuscripts fully preserve. Transliteration Kiutu br 6 49a (Nin5 r. 11). [ka-sili]m {šà} ~úl-la [...] Kiutu br 6 50a (Nin5 r. 12). [enim-ĝar sa6-g]a [...] Kiutu br 6 51a (Nin5 r. 13). [ d utu lugal dum]u diĝir-ra-na ! šu-a ~é-en-d[a-ab-...] Kiutu br 6 52a (Nin5 r. 14). [en ki-gal kul-aba4]{ ki?-ke4 ? } {saĝ ?-ni ?-x} {kù ?-ga ? } [...] Translation Kiutu br 6 49a. [in the peac]e of the joy of the heart [...] Kiutu br 6 50a. in [the good utterance] [...] Kiutu br 6 51a. [Utu], may [the king, so]n of his god, be sa[ved ...] Kiutu br 6 52a. [Lord, pedestal] of [Kulaba], steadfastly, the holy [...] Notes 51. This verb is probably to be restored as a form of šu(-ĝar) ge4, cf. Unb3: šu-a; Nin1: šu-ĝar (previously read as níĝ), probably meant as a possible restoration due to the occurrence of magāri in the Akkadian line (suggestion courtesy T. Mitto). 75. The contribution was written with the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

This is an extended and modified version of a shorter talk given at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society for the Plenary Session on the topic of translation in March of 2013. The longer version of the talk presented here was given at Yale University and the Universitaet Tuebingen later the same year.

Iraq 70, 2008

This paper deals with tablet 16.265 that was found in the royal palace of Ugarit in 1952. About sixteen lines of this tablet are written in a form of a letter. Yet, an examination of the epigraphic features of the tablet and the content of the letter suggest that this tablet was used as a scribal exercise. We examine the poetic aspects of the text and suggest that this letter was written as a playful poetic letter that describes the training of the beginner royal scribe in Ugarit.

Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Society, 2018

The close examination of a large previously unedited literary fragment from Old Babylonian Ur reveals that it is a letter-prayer or Gottesbrief to Ninšubur.

Kaskal 19, 2022

The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, the Fragmentarium has now reached the size of 21,200 cuneiform tablets, totalling over 300,000 lines of text. Secondly, the Corpus has been greatly enlarged with editions of several texts, such as the Hymn to Ninurta as Savior, the Great Prayer to Nabû, and particularly the Epic of Gilgameš. Thirdly, a sophisticated string-alignment algorithm, based on the python-alignment library, has been fine-tuned for cuneiform script and implemented. The algorithm has been run several times, and has found several matchings that had escaped the attention of humans, such as a new fragment of the latest datable manuscript of Gilgameš edited in no. 27, text no. 2. The growth of the manuscript base of texts is important in its own right, but it also has a larger significance for the understanding of Mesopotamian literature, since it contributes decisively to its contextualization. The importance of recovering the context in a tradition in which the authors of most texts are still unknown, and indeed in which the date of composition of almost all works of literature is impossible to establish, can hardly be overstated. In this respect, the pièce de résistance of this collection is constituted by T. Mitto's new edition of the Catalogue of Texts and Authors (no. 26). The edition is informed by several new fragments and includes two pieces of a hitherto unsuspected

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