The Lexical Texts from Old Babylonian Mari

The royal palace of Mari. Photograph © Zukaa (Own work), CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Excavations at Mari yielded a huge royal palace and large numbers of cuneiform texts, primarily letters and administrative documents. These texts throw an incomparable light on the workings of the palace and its dealings with the international politics of the time on the one hand and internal factions on the other hand.

Lexical texts and exercise texts from Mari do not derive from the royal palace itself, but from private houses in the city. The great majority of such tablets remains unpublished, with the exception of a group of mathematical texts and a single exercise that combines a god list with an elementary sign list.

Further reading

• Cavigneaux, Antoine, and Laurent Colonna d'Istria 2009 Les découverts épigraphiques des fouilles récentes de Mari. état des recherches en janvier 2009. Studia Orontica 6: 51-68.
• Lambert, W.G. 1985 A List of Gods' Names found at Mari. Pp. 181-90 in Miscellanea Babylonica. Mélanges offerts à Maurice Birot, eds. Jean-Marie Durand and J.-R. Kupper. Paris: éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations.
• Oelsner, Joachim 1989 Zu einer Schülertafel aus Mari. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 1989/33: 22-23.
• Robson, Eleanor 2008 Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Soubeyran, Denis 1984 Textes mathematiques de Mari. Revue d'Assyriologie 78: 19-48.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Old Babylonian Mari', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/oldbabylonian/mari/]