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The Fifth Tablet of “The Topography of Babylon”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

O. R. Gurney
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Extract

The series “Topography of Babylon”, known from its first line as DIN.TIRki = Bābilu, was first put together from several fragments by Eckhard Unger in a chapter contributed to F. Wetzel, Die Stadtmauern von Babylon (WVDOG 48, 1930), then repeated with some minor changes (not always for the better) in his book Babylon, Die heilige Stadt (1931). In a long review of the latter book in ZA NF 7 (1933) B. Landsberger and F. H. Weissbach made a number of improvements in the text and its translation. But the only major additions to the preserved text as presented by Unger have come from tablets excavated at Kish, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and published by P. E. van der Meer in Volume 5 of this journal (1938) and in Archiv für Orientforschung 13. While cataloguing the Ashmolean collection I have succeeded in joining not only two of the fragments published by van der Meer but also six more pieces of this same tablet, which now has at least parts of every line with the exception of a few at the beginning and end. It is the purpose of the present article to present an edition of this important tablet, with its duplicates, containing as it does an almost complete list of the “daises”, i.e. chapels, of Marduk (parakkí), a section which was largely missing, together with the gates, walls, rivers and streets of the city, the totals for the different items, and a section at the end describing the ten districts of the city which is also partly new. The article is dedicated to Sir Max Mallowan, who has lectured on Babylon at Oxford, in the hope that he will find some interest in a dry catalogue of the city's topographical features such as this tablet offers.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 36 , Issue 1-2 , October 1974 , pp. 39 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1974

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References

1 Restored from Ashm. 1924–849:1, in which the ta is clear and is followed by traces of the na which in turn is clear on the photograph of VAT 13101 in WVDOG 48. Both tablets have been misread in the past. I am indebted to W. G. Lambert for the reading of the last word, which is derived from duplicates.

2 1924–849, 810 and 846, published by van der Meer, in Iraq 5, 55 ffGoogle Scholar.

3 See CT 51, foreword.

4 My thanks are due to the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to publish the two fragments.

5 G: …] gods and goddesses of the clan(?) of Marduk (see notes on text).

6 Perhaps another street name.

7 E: 53; F: 23. See notes on text.

8 G apparently “the Rainbow”.

9 Another name for the Adad Gate which led to the town of this name.

10 Babylon, 82–3, and Abb. 64 (plan at end).

11 E.g. Pinches, in PSBA 33 (1911), 161Google Scholar; Unger, , Babylon, 25 n. 1Google Scholar. It is among the names of Babylon in the first tablet of DIN.TIRki (van der Meer, , Iraq 5, 60, line 21Google Scholar).

12 Unger, , Babylon, 73Google Scholar; Weissbach, , ZA NF 7, 264Google Scholar. Here no. 10 in Fig. 1.

13 CAD s.v. abullu (only 5 passages—2 from Boğazköy—are quoted for the meaning “gate of a building”); Unger, , Babylon 65Google Scholar, and RlA I, 339b.

14 Placed by Weissbach on the north front of the “Eastern Annexe” of the temple (ZA NF 7, 259; WVDOG 59, 64–65). A gate in this position could hardly have served as a point of reference for a district.

15 Strassmaier, Nbk. no. 247, 12–13; the name also appears in KAR 109, obv. 21. Other references in RlA II, 321 (Ebeling).

16 CT 37, 14, 43 [apud Unger, , Babylon, 249Google Scholar).

17 The two documents cited by Unger (p. 80) and by the CAD (s.v. eššu) give no indication of the location of the district, except for the reference to an otherwise unknown processional street.