The Lexical Texts from Kassite Nippur

The Kassite period was a formative period in the history of the lexical tradition. Important lexical compositions such as the sign list Ea, and the list of compound signs Diri were greatly expanded and received the more or less standardized form they would keep all through the first millennium. Other important lexical compositions were first composed in the Kassite period, including the word lists Erimhuš and Nabnītu, and the god list An = Anum. These are three extensive and complex lists that continued to be used in Babylonian education until the end of cuneiform civilization in a form that probably did not differ much from the Kassite original.

The importance of the Kassite period stands in shrill contrast to the number of Kassite-period lexical texts that we have. In addition to a few hundred exercise texts with brief extracts from Babylon and Nippur, there are just about fifteen larger tablets (or fragments of such tablets) that give us a taste of what must have been there. Most of these tablets were excavated in Nippur.

CBS 13924; Kassite exemplar of Nabnītu 21 from Nippur. Photograph © University of Pennsylvania Museum.

One of the new lexical series, known as Nabnītu, consisted of more than 30 chapters and organized vocabulary according to the activities of the human body from head to toe. Within individual sections the composition collects Akkadian words that are etymologically related or phonologically similar. This is an entirely new lexicographical concept that attests to the scholarly creativity of the period. The organization of Nabnītu may have been helpful in locating Sumerian equivalents of Akkadian words.

The tablet shown here represents Tablet 21 and is essentially identical to the twenty-first chapter of Nabnītu in its first millennium fashion, making it likely that the entire series already existed in the late second millennium. Not more than three or four Kassite fragments of the series are known today.

The Kassite kingdom was part of a political world that was vastly different from earlier periods. Babylonia had become a territorial state, centered around the old royal city of Babylon, the new residence at Dūr-Kurigalzu, and the religious capital at Nippur with the temple of Enlil. The political and diplomatic horizon of the Kassite monarchs stretched as far as Egypt and Hatti and this system remained fairly stable for several centuries.

Within this political context several changes took place that may have had a direct influence on the way the lexical corpus functioned. First, the idea of an unchanging stable text, one that was copied from one generation to another and that ultimately went back to the fog of time, became more and more important. Second, writing in an almost incomprehensible style, using rare words and rare signs, or rarely used values of signs, became a hallmark of high culture. This may be observed in Akkadian literary texts such as Ludlul (also known as the Babylonian Job), but also in the Sumerian of contemporary seal inscriptions and of the royal inscription on the statue of Kurigalzu. Third, an important theme of religious writings becomes the incomprehensibility of the gods themselves. The gods, or at least the high gods, may be further removed from humankind than they were in previous periods; they are unfathomable and the human mind is incapable of grasping their ways. Fourth, the Sumerian language becomes a vehicle for communicating with the gods. Temple building inscriptions are always, prayers on cylinder seals are often written in Sumerian.

Together these trends suggest a context in which Sumerian lexicography could thrive, in which it was useful to be able not only to locate a word for "woman" in Sumerian - but to find the most unusual one. Unfortunately, each of the developments indicated above is difficult to date with any precision. Writing in a deliberately difficult style certainly took off in the Old Babylonian period, the stabilization of traditional texts may have become much more prominent in the subsequent Second Dynasty of Isin. The primary data set for scholarly writings in the Kassite period is still rather meagre and it is impossible, for now, to discuss developments that may have taken place within this period of several centuries.

Further reading

• Frahm, Eckart 2011 Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries. Origins of Interpretation. Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record 5. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
• Van der Toorn, Karel 2007 Why Wisdom Became a Secret: On Wisdom as a Written Genre. Pp. 21-29 in Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 36. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
• Veldhuis, Niek C. 2000 Kassite Exercises: Literary and Lexical Extracts. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 52: 67-94.
• Veldhuis, Niek C. 2008 Kurigalzu's Statue Inscription. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 60: 25-51.

Niek Veldhuis

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