The Old Babylonian copy of the Early Dynastic List of Vessels and Garments, HS 1822

HS 1822: Old Babylonian copy of the Early Dynastic list of Vessels and Garments with glosses. Photograph by Jay Crisostomo. Copyright © Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena.

The list of Vessels and Garments was one of the most frequently copied lists in the Archaic period (also known as late-Uruk period, around 3,200 BCE), the period of the invention of cuneiform writing. In the third millennium, however, the list (ED Vessels and Garments) became very rare - only a few exemplars from Šurupak and Abu Salabikh (middle of third millennium) are known today. The Jena exemplar is from the Old Babylonian period, ca. 1,800 BCE; by this time the list was some 1,500 years old and many of the entries were antiquated or obscure to the scribes of the time. Glosses in tiny script annotate the text and demonstrate scholarly interest in this ancient lexical composition. Another Old Babylonian exemplar, also provided with glosses, is now kept in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia (CBS 13922 (+) CBS 14130).

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'The Old Babylonian copy of the Early Dynastic List of Vessels and Garments, HS 1822', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts: Jena, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/jena/highlights/hs1822/]