Ricerc@Sapienza

In this paper I analyze the different occasion and reason for traveling of the Neo-Assyrian experts of scribal, mantic, and therapeutic disciplines (ummânu).

La présente contribution propose un survol des différentes occurrences de l’Arc-en-ciel dans la documentation cunéiforme. Deux thématiques principales sont envisagées en fonction des attestations. D’une part, l’arc-en-ciel fait l’objet d’une attention particulière en tant que phénomène atmosphérique à interpréter sur le plan divinatoire : dans les listes de présages du recueil astronomique Enūma Anu Enlil (Ier millénaire av. J.-C.), une seule couleur saillante lui est associée, tandis que sa forme reste la clé d’interprétation prédominante.

Status quaestionis on musical performance's studies and introduction to the articles collected in the volume The Study of Musical Performance in Antiquity

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 ancient Mesopotamia, infancy is an elusive category. Although vague- ly defined from a lexical viewpoint, the concept of childhood is almost en- tirely absent from literature, and seldom represented in non-literary textual sources. Texts regarding childbirth, however, constitute an exception to this. Several sources, from mythological accounts of creation (anthropogonies) to therapeutic texts and omens, shift their attention to birth and the baby. Taking this fact into account, in this paper I focus on the role that children bodies play in divination.

In this paper I deal with the role dress and clothing play in the constitution and shaping of individual identity. Through the close analysis of a number of case studies, namely the substitute king (“King of substitution” šar pūḫi) and “A man’s substitute for Ereškigal” (ana pūḫi amēli Ereškigal) rituals, as well as the practice of exposing royal robes as representation of the king in his absence, I explore the mechanisms that make possible for clothing to both represent and substitute the individual.

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 propose a holistic interpreta- tion of a well-defined corpus of third millennium BC in- scribed artefacts, focusing on the relationships between text (format and content), the artefact, and its original destination and deposition. I aim to underline the social dimension of inscribed objects and, in general, of writing in votive depositional contexts. As a case study, I have focused on the inscribed artefacts found in level VIIB of the Inanna Temple at Nippur.

25 tablets kept in the collections of the British Museum are published in this article. They belong to the so- called “dossier of the shepherds” of Ĝirsu. To their transliteration and translation an up-dated study of this
dossier follows together with the edition of a balanced account that mentions the same officials of the dossier.

This article constitutes the first part of a larger study on the fullers in Neo-Sumerian documents from Umma. I hereby collect and discuss all the relevant texts that record the fullers’ names and their activity.