Lexical Texts from Kassite Babylon

VS 24, 15 (VAT 17563); Kassite exercise from Babylon. Photograph © Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin.

This tablet (VS 24, 15 = VAT 17563) was excavated in Babylon in a Kassite-period residential area. The format is typical for Kassite exercises: obverse and reverse are inscribed at right angles. The obverse has an unidentified literary extract (mostly broken). The reverse has the beginning of the list lu₂ = šu, a list of professions. The passage includes various Akkadian translations for the Sumerian word lu₂ (man) and words for king, or king of all the lands.

The tablet belongs to a large group of Kassite exercises that were excavated early in the twentieth century by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, to be published by Alexa Bartelmus.

One single-column tablet with an extract from the god list An = Anum VS 24, 17 was found in a late Kassite house with a group of omen texts.

In addition to the exercises, a few larger lexical tablets from Babylon, including VS 24, 5 (Izi) and BAM 7, 51 (Kagal), probably date to the Kassite period.

For a general discussion of Kassite lexical texts, see the Nippur page.

Further reading

• Pedersén, Olof 2005 Archive und Bibliotheken in Babylon. Die Tontafeln der Grabung Robert Koldeweys 1899-1917. Abhandlungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 25: Saarländische Druckerei und Verlag, pp. 85-92.
• Veldhuis, Niek C. 2000 Kassite Exercises: Literary and Lexical Extracts. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 52: 67-94.
• Veldhuis, Niek C. 2009 BAM 7, 51: An Alternative Reading. Le Journal des Médecines Cunéiformes 14: 44-48.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'Lexical Texts from Kassite Babylon', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/babylon/]