The Lexical Texts from Dilmun
Diri fragment from Bahrain. © Béatrice André-Salvini, Les tablettes cunéiformes de Qal'at al-Bahreïn. Pp. 126-28 in Bahreïn. La civilisation des deux mers de Dilmoun à Tylos, ed. Pierre Lombard. Paris: Institut du monde arabe.
During the Middle Babylonian period the island of Dilmun (modern Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf) came under control of the Kassite kings in Babylonia, who installed a governor there. In earlier centuries Dilmun had been an important trading partner of Babylonia providing the gateway for overseas trade. With Kassite dominion came cuneiform writing, and with cuneiform writing came exercises and lexical texts. A small group of administrative tablets from Dilmun is dated to the time of king Agum, in the early Kassite period (fifteenth century). Among these tablets are two exercises, a round tablet with a sign list, and a cushion-shaped exercise (contents unidentified). In addition, the excavations yielded a large fragment of a copy of the list of compound signs Diri.
27 Dec 2019Further reading
- André-Salvini, Béatrice 1999 Les tablettes cunéiformes de Qal'at al-Bahreïn. Pp. 126-28 in Bahreïn. La civilisation des deux mers de Dilmoun à Tylos, ed. Pierre Lombard. Paris: Institut du monde arabe.
- Eidem, Jesper 1997 Cuneiform Inscriptions in Qala'at al-Bahrain Volume 2. The Central Monumental Buildings, eds. F. Højlund and H.H. Andersen. Jutland Archaeological Society Publications 30/2. Aarhus: Aarhus University.
- Van Koppen, Frans 2010 The Old to Middle Babylonian Transition: History and Chronology of the Mesopotamian Dark Age. Ägypten und Levante 20: 453-64.
Niek Veldhuis
Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Dilmun', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/dilmun/]