About the Project

This sub-project of the open-access Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo) Project [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/] is intended to present up-to-date editions of the officially commissioned texts of the six kings of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty (625-539 BC). "Babylon 7," or "The Royal Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar II, and Their Successors," carries on where the RIMB (Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Babylonian Periods) publications of the now-defunct Toronto-based Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project ended. The annotated editions included here will also appear in the publication series Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (RINBE) [https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/chairs/chair_radner/research_radner/rinbe/index.html], which is led by Karen Radner (Chair for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich) and Grant Frame (University of Pennsylvania) and which will be published by Eisenbrauns [ https://www.eisenbrauns.org], an imprint of Penn State University Press.

Numerous inscriptions of the dynasty's most famous kings (Nabopolassar [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nabopolassar/index.html], Nebuchadnezzar II [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nebuchadnezzarii/index.html], and Nabonidus [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nabonidus/index.html]), as well as a few from the reigns of its lesser known rulers (Amēl-Marduk [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/amelmarduk/index.html], Neriglissar [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/neriglissar/index.html], and Lâbâši-Marduk [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/labashimarduk/index.html]), have been published. Many inscribed objects of theirs were unearthed at the beginning of the twentieth century when German archaeologists excavated Babylon (1899–1917). Although Rocío Da Riva has made available transliterations and translations of the official texts of Nabopolassar [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nabopolassar/index.html], Amēl-Marduk [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/amelmarduk/index.html], and Neriglissar [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/neriglissar/index.html] (2013), as well as a few of the more important inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nebuchadnezzarii/index.html] (2009, 2012, and 2013 in particular), and Hanspeter Schaudig has published editions of Nabonidus [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nabonidus/index.html]' inscriptions (2001), no comprehensive publication of editions of the complete corpus of royal inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty has appeared. Such an undertaking has been in the works since 1979, when A. Kirk Grayson initiated the RIM Project at the University of Toronto; these texts were to be edited as volumes 3 and 4 of the RIMB sub-series. Under the direction of Radner and Frame, the RINBE Project will produce a complete, modern scholarly edition of the corpus of official inscriptions of the last native kings of Babylon (626–539 BCE) in print and in an annotated, open-access digital format. The "Babylon 7" sub-project of RIBo serves as the open-access portal of the Eisenbrauns-published RINBE book series. For further details about the scope of this project (2018–24), see the RINBE home page [https://www.en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/chairs/chair_radner/research_radner/rinbe/index.html].

The annotated editions of the official texts of Nabopolassar [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nabopolassar/index.html], included here have been adapted from Rocío Da Riva, The Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Amel-Marduk and Neriglissar (Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 3), Boston: de Gruyter, 2013. Those of Nebuchadnezzar II [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rulers/nebuchadnezzarii/index.html], starting already in 2019, are largely based on unpublished material kindly contributed by Grant Frame and Rocío Da Riva, as well as the following three publications of Da Riva:

(1) "The Nebuchadnezzar Rock Inscription at Nahr el-Kalb", in: A.-M. Maïla-Afeiche (ed.), Le site de Nahr el-Kalb (Bulletin d'Archéologie et d'Architecture Libanaises, Hors-Série 5), Beirut: Ministère de la Culture: Direction Générale des Antiquités, 2009;
(2) The Twin Inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar at Brisa (Wadi esh-Sharbin, Lebanon): A Historical and Philological Study (Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft 32), Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 2012; and
(3) "Nebuchadnezzar II's Prism (EȘ 7834): A New Edition", Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 103/2 (2013), pp. 196-229.

Sponsors and timing

This website was created as part of the research project Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), whose funding is provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East [http://www.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/lehrstuehle/ls_radner/index.html]) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Historisches Seminar - Abteilung Alte Geschichte). RINBE/"Babylon 7" is funded until July 2022 by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Gerda Henkel Foundation [https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/english]. The project is expected to take eight years to complete (2017-24). Since there is much work to do and finish before we have reached our primary objects, please bear with us as we expand, improve, and refine our content.

Between 2019 and 2024, RINBE/"Babylon 7" will create a complete and authoritative modern presentation of the entire corpus of the royal inscriptions of the six kings of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in print and in a fully annotated (linguistically tagged), open-access digital format. The chief outcome of the project will be the production of three print volumes. In addition, its core data, with substantial contextualization and metadata and linkage to external resources, will be disseminated online for free. The open-access, online facilities include:

RINBE will produce three books. These publications will be:

Project team

Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (OIMEA) Editorial Board

OIMEA Advisory Committee

RINBE Editorial Board

RINBE Consultants

"Babylon 7" Contributors/RINBE Team

Credits and Copyright

The contents of this website, except where noted below, are the intellectual property of the MOCCI. They are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license.

This means that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt our work without permission, under the following conditions:

Any of these conditions may be waived in the right circumstances, if you explicitly ask us for permission.

Read our hints and suggestions for reusing material from Oracc [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/reusingoracc/index.html]. For information on how to cite Oracc URLs online and in print, click here [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/citingurls/index.html].

Images taken from third-party websites are all credited and linked to those websites, where information about copyright may be found.

Jamie Novotny

Jamie Novotny, 'About the Project', RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, The RIBo Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2023 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/abouttheproject/]

 
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