This text has been traditionally known to experts as the "Topography" (German Stadtbeschreibung) of Babylon. However, the more recent edition of it included in George 1992, by reconstructing a much more complete text than the one previously known, demonstrates convincingly that the topographical sections were only a minor part of the main body of the work. For this reason, George proposes a revival of the ancient title by which the text was known to Babylonian scholars and was referred to in both a catalogue of literary texts from Ashurbanipal's library and in the actual colophons of the tablets: Tintir = Babylon.
Tintir = Babylon is a series of five tablets, reconstructed with different degrees of completion.
Tablet I (see Tintir 1) contains a list arranged in three sub-columns with the 51 names and epithets of Babylon. The city is presented as a seat of abundance and life, opulence and luxury, rejoicing and festivals, truth and justice, peace and happiness; a place strongly linked with the heavens and an abode of the gods; an old foundation, whose rites are precious and selected; a sacred and privileged place; a curator of the life, wisdom and constant happiness of the lands; an antagonist of enemies, injustice and arrogance.
Tablet II (see Tintir 2) is not totally preserved, but in the form so far reconstructed it records a list of small shrines, most probably parts of the Esagil, the temple complex of Marduk at Babylon. The shrines are mostly labelled "seat," meaning the pedestal of a divine symbol or image, and occasionally a small room to store cultic equipment. The two sub-column arrangement displays the Sumerian ceremonial name of each "seat" on the left and a brief description mentioning the respective belonging deity/ies, the location, the divine occupant/s, and the associated cultic function on the right.
Tablet III: the contents of the text of Tablet III (see Tintir 3) have not been reconstructed. Either the remnants of this tablet are completely lost, or thematically similar fragments have not been recognized as belonging to this text.
Tablet IV (see Tintir 4) lists the 43 major temples of Babylon, again by means of a two sub-column arrangement with the Sumerian ceremonial name on the left and the associated deity — or a cosmological explanation for the most famous cult-centers as for example the Esagil — on the right. The temples are ordered topographically according to the district in which they were located, starting from the cult centers of Eridu, the religious quarter of Babylon, and continuing through the other boroughs of the eastern and the western halves of the city. Some of the temples included in this list receive explanations in other commentaries, such as Explanation of Temple Names in Babylon A, B, C, D.
Tablet V (see Tintir 5) is more heterogeneous in its content, which can be divided in four sections. The first section (ll. 1–48) presents a one-column list of daises of Marduk, most likely small shrines scattered throughout the city and accessible to the general public. The second section (ll. 49–81) includes objects of topographical interest such as gates, walls, rivers, and streets, which also performed sacred functions in the city by protecting its space, ensuring abundance, and providing space for its cultic processions. The third section (ll. 82–88) can be viewed as a summary of the information given in the previous lists about temples, daises, and topographical features. Finally, the fourth section (ll. 89–104) describes the ten city quarters of the east and the west bank according to their respective landmarks.
Tintir = Babylon is the most popular text of the erudite literary genre characterized by eclectic compilations and commentaries and ascribable to the intellectual scholars of the Kassite and later periods. This genre, to which the Götteraddressbuch of Aššur as well as the Nippur Compendium also belong, was meant to revive the themes and partly the language of the traditional Sumerian hymns in order to glorify the theological and cosmological importance of a city.
Undoubtedly this was also the underlying purpose of the present text, which aimed to celebrate the fame of Babylon as a great religious center. As George persuasively pointed out, such an aim was closely related to the ascendency of the city of Babylon and its main god Marduk respectively in the Mesopotamian area and in the Mesopotamian pantheon. Like the Creation Epic – with which Tintir = Babylon has a close relationship - can be seen as a mythological etiology of Marduk's elevation, in the same manner Tintir = Babylon can be viewed as a theological and cosmological background to Babylon's supremacy. We can thus assume a common chronological framework for these two compositions in the twelfth century, a time of increased theological speculation apt to lay the foundations of the new order.
Topography of Babylon
Although conceived mainly as a theological and cosmological glorification of Babylon, Tintir = Babylon remains however the most important source for our understanding of the topography of the city. In fact, even though the text describes Babylon as it presumably stood in the twelfth century, its similarity to the city of the sixth century brought to light by archeological excavations is evident, proving that Babylon's organization didn't change a lot over time and that the claims of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian kings to have respected the original plans in their reconstructions were indeed accurate.
The recognizable layout, without doubt the result of intentional planning, consists of a consistent plan. The inner area of the city, bisected from north to south by the river Arahtu (a branch of the Euphrates), is defined by a rectangular wall named in the sources Imgur-Enlil, i.e. "Enlil has shown favor," and is connected to the external town-surface, and far beyond to the outside periphery, through gates and processional streets.
Tintir = Babylon mentions eight gates, named after the great Babylonian deities. The excavations have revealed four of them on the eastern section of Imgur-Enlil: the Ištar Gate, the most famous, identified by its foundation inscription (see Nebuchadnezzar II Ishtar Gate) and located on the north segment; the Uraš Gate, identifiable with the one on the south segment, near the river bank, thanks to the inscriptions of Neo-Babylonian kings (see as example Nabopolassar 02); the Zababa and the Marduk Gates, which according to Wetzel and George should correspond to the two gates dug up on the east stretch of the city wall both in consideration of their position in the list offered by Tintir 5, where they occur after the Uraš Gate and before the Ištar Gate, and because of the connection of the Zababa Gate with the street to Kish, the god's cult center that lay east of Babylon. The western part of the city, across the river, has never been excavated; therefore, no actual archaeological evidence can be relied on to support the textual evidence. However, if - as George proposed - the order of the list follows the sequence of gates in the wall's circuit in the western section as it does in the eastern one, we should find the Enlil Gate on the north segment, the King's Gate and the Adad Gate on the west stretch and the Šamaš Gate, mentioned in a royal inscription of Nabonidus (see Nabonidus 1001), on the southern tract – where a document from the reign of the same king also seems to locate it. This symmetrical pattern would allow us to recognize an optimum configuration, which has already been underlined by the regularity of the plan and which can be mirrored also in the names given to the gates, tightly linked to the venerable temples occupied and the procession streets used by homonymous deities (as, for example, in the case of Enlil, Adad, and Šamaš, whose sanctuaries were located in the western part of the city) or to the roads leading to their cult-centers (like Uraš and Zababa, venerated respectively in Dilbat and Kish, which were reachable via the roads passing through their gates).
The location of the gates on the circuit wall was of very meaningful, as they were also employed in Tintir 5 as landmarks for the extension of the city districts. Ten quarters are known from the same list, as well as from Tintir 4 where nine of them are mentioned in reference to the temples located in their areas. Both lists record first the districts of the eastern half of the city followed by those of the western half. The first quarter mentioned in both inventories is Eridu. Named after one of the oldest cities of southern Mesopotamia, whose pantheon had already been linked to Babylon's in the Old Babylonian period, Eridu was one of the most ancient hubs and by far the most sacred one: in fact, this region of the city was home to fourteen temples. Among them was the great religious complex of Marduk, with his temple Esagil and his ziggurat Etemenanki, undoubtedly the most important sanctuary of the city. Eridu was also one of the names of Babylon, as mentioned in Tintir 1, as well as the names of the two following districts in the lists: Šuanna and Ka-dingirra. South of Eridu, Šuanna extended until the Uraš Gate and included two temples, the Ehursagtila of Ninurta and the Ešasurra of Išhara, which can be identified with the two cult-centers brought to light by the German excavations. Ka-dingirra, north of Eridu, stretching as far as the Ištar Gate, is one of the best-known districts of Babylon, having been extensively explored by the archeological research. Thanks to this research, all four temples mentioned in this district — the Emaḫ of the Mother Goddess, the Emašdari of Bēlet-Agade, the Eniggidarkalammasuma of Nabû of the harû and the Ehilikalama of Ašratu — have been identified, as well as the royal palace of the Neo-Babylonian kings and the Ay-ibur-šabu, the processional road of Marduk. Between the Ištar Gate and the Marduk Gate, thus in the north-east corner of the inner city, two other districts bordered each other: New City and Kullab. No archeological exploration has been carried out in these areas, nor in the last quarter of the eastern half of the city, TE.E, delimited by the Zababa Gate and therefore collocated in the south-east corner. As for the western half of the city, four districts are recorded in Tintir 5. However, as already mentioned, the textual evidence is our only source of information for the location of the gates in this area. If we can agree upon the order of the gates suggested by George, then it follows that: the quarter of Tuba, extending between the Šamaš Gate and the Euphrates, was located in the south, close to the river bank; the district of Kumar, known already from sources of the Old Babylonian period and constituting at that time the oldest nucleus of the city together with the district of Eridu across the river, extended in the center; the borough of Bāb-Lugalirra was most probably on the north of Kumar; a last hub, whose name is not preserved in the sources, stretched through the west as far as the Adad Gate.
Further Reading
Giulia Lentini
Giulia Lentini, 'Tintir = Babylon', Babylonian Topographical Texts online (BTTo), BTTo, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2022 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/btto/tintirbabylon/]