The present series of publications, Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (RINBE), is intended to present a comprehensive, modern scholarly edition of the complete corpus of official inscriptions of the last native kings of Babylon (626–539 BC), which comprises about 230 compositions written on approximately 1,500 clay and stone objects. It is modeled on the publications of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) series and the soon-to-be-completed Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) series. RINBE is the successor of both of the aforementioned publication series. Although some of RINBE's contents have been publicly available online since August 2015 via the "Babylon 7" sub-project of the open-access Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo) Project, the project officially began in June 2017, when we, RINBE's co-founders and directors, established the series' editorial board, its team of consultants, and the books' authors.
During the next couple of years, RINBE 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 three books and in a fully annotated, linguistically tagged, Open Access and Open Data digital format. In addition to this core data, the online version offers substantial metadata and contextualization resources, as well as linkage to further external resources. The online facilities include:
As part of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI) based at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München's Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department), RINBE's contents are fully integrated into the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) Project, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), and the Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Polities (ARMEP) map interface. The print publications, like the RINAP volumes, are published by Eisenbrauns, now an imprint of Penn State University Press. They use the same formatting as the RINAP publications, but with one important addition: Golden Standard Open Access publishing, that is, PDFs is available for free download without an embargo period directly upon publication.
This book, despite being the first volume to appear, is the second volume in the RINBE series. A two-part volume of the inscriptions of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II is to follow. All three books are principally prepared by Frauke Weiershäuser and Jamie Novotny, with the input of valuable expertise from members of the series' editorial board and its team of consultants, as well as the cheerful and productive assistance of Giulia Lentini. It is our pleasure to dedicate this first volume to Martin Zimmermann, Professor of Ancient History at LMU Munich, whose tireless efforts to widen the remit of his academic discipline, as taught in Munich, to also include the Ancient Near East resulted in the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East in 2015, and this created the research and funding context that enabled us to embark on this ambitious publication project.
We are very happy to express our deep appreciation to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and LMU Munich, which through the establishment of the Karen Radner's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East in 2015 allowed this publication project to find a home at LMU's History Department. Both institutions provided crucial financial support for our work. LMU in particular strategically invested funds in Frauke Weiershäuser's research position, which enabled prioritizing the publication project within MOCCI. In addition, research grants awarded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf) to Jamie Novotny in 2018 and to Jamie Novotny and Karen Radner in 2019 helped to quickly implement the work program, especially collating original objects kept in the British Museum (London), the Iraq Museum (Baghdad), and the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Berlin). We would like to express our profound thanks and are enormously grateful for the warm support that RINBE has received from these institutions, especially the Vorderasiatisches Museum, whose new director, Barbara Helwing, has graciously made all relevant finds from the Babylon excavations accessible to us. We are very pleased to cooperate with the VAM's Babylon Project.
Munich and Philadelphia April 2020
Karen Radner and Grant Frame
The Directors
Karen Radner & Grant Frame
Karen Radner & Grant Frame, 'Directors' Foreword ', RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, The RIBo Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2022 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/rinbe2frontmatter/]