With this volume of The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire publication series (RINBE 2), Frauke Weiershäuser and Jamie Novotny present the complete corpus of known inscriptions of the kings Amēl-Marduk, Neriglissar, and Nabonidus. Through the series' clear structure and inclusion of metadata, RINBE sets the publishing standard for the modern presentation of such ancient inscriptions and, therefore, is an invaluable scholarly resource.
A considerable number of examples of Akkadian inscriptions of these three Babylonian kings are preserved on clay tablets and other inscribed objects (especially mud bricks and barrel-shaped clay cylinders) found during the excavations by Robert Koldewey from 1899 to 1917 in Babylon. The numerous artifacts from the Babylon excavations were divided between Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The share of the finds from Babylon allocated to Germany, including close to 5,000 inscribed objects, is now kept in the collections of the Vorderasiatisches Museum SMB SPK in Berlin. Many text archives from Babylon have previously been collated and published, but a full and comprehensive study of the Babylon collections in Berlin is still on-going. In this regard, the Vorderasiatisches Museum acknowledges and highly welcomes the work that has made the present volume (RINBE 2) possible. This study helps place the Babylon collections in Berlin into a wider historical and cultural context, as well as offers new perspectives of and interconnections between this rich source material. The book also highlights some of the special objects in Berlin that were discovered during Koldewey's excavations. For example, clay cylinder VA Bab 2971 (Nabonidus 2 ex. 1) is an exquisitely-inscribed object that records Nabonidus' rebuilding of the temple of the goddess Ištar; that cylinder is the only complete copy of that text. Therefore, the Vorderasiatisches Museum would like to express its sincere gratitude to the authors of this book for their diligent and careful work.
The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, as one of the many research institutions united under the umbrella of the Staatliche Museen Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, represents a unique archive of world knowledge and, thus, making these archives available to scholars is one of the museum's most important tasks. This has successfully happened here, with the publication of the present book, and the start of the RINBE series marks a promising step towards further research collaboration between the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI) and the Vorderasiatisches Museum.
Berlin April 2020
Barbara Helwing
Barbara Helwing
Barbara Helwing, 'Foreword from the Director of the Vorderasiatisches Museum', 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/forewordfromthedirectorofthevorderasiatischesmuseum/]