Ricerc@Sapienza

Edizione, trascrizione, traduzione e commento di un frammento di iscrizione palmirena inedita presente nella collezione Pottesman del British Museum (Appendice Agostini).

Third-millennium Mesopotamia has provided an impressive quantity of sources for the study of ancient slavery, among them a collection of standards (the so-called Laws of Ur-Namma). Despite the volume of documents, Mesopotamian slavery remains elusive in its general traits. This is partly due to the nature of the sources, but also to the approaches and interpretations of modern scholars. Slavery in ancient Mesopotamia has been the focus of several studies in the 1960s and 1970s that interpreted the sources using comparative approaches and Marxist analyses.

In this brief article four previously unpub- lished texts kept in the Museum of Discovery at Fort Collins (Colorado) are presented. All of them, except probably one, were acquired from E.J. Banks by C.P. Gil- lette, an internationally renowned entomologist who worked at the Colorado State University from 1891 to 1930. Three of the texts are related to the Third Dynasty of Ur, while one is a historical inscription (clay cone) of Sîn-Kašid of Uruk. A description of the history of the objects is added as an Appendix.

In this article I surveys Sumerian and Akkadian childbirth incantations from the III and II mill. BCE Mesopotamia. In particular, I analyze metaphors of conception and birth, discussing common and diffused topics (the woman associated to the cow, the open/closed way, the boat).

This article surveys the inscribed artefacts found in Tell Zurghul (Nina/Niĝin) for which an origin from this site can be advanced. A history of the archaeological excavations, early travellers’ visits, and local peoples’ frequentation of the site is sketched, and a discussion of the surface findings and the objects appeared in the antiquities market is provided.

In this article I focus on the soundscapes that emerge from Sumerian literary texts. In the introduction, I deal with the terminology and relevance of hearing in Sumerian culture and sensory model. I then discuss the relationship between hearing and knowledge, the power of the word, and the sensorial dimension in cosmogonies.