Inscriptions on Cylinders (text no. 21)

21

Several fragments of a clay cylinder from Nineveh are inscribed with one of the latest extant texts composed in the name of Ashurbanipal. At present, this is the only positively identified inscription of this king from Assyria written on a cylinder. The inscription provides a summary of some of Ashurbanipal's building activities in Assyria and Babylonia and of his military conquests, most notable of which is the defeat of the Cimmerian ruler Tugdammî, which is also recorded in text nos. 13 (Prism J) and 23 (IIT). Although the date line (line 2´´) is completely missing, the text's approximate date of composition may have been ca. 638.

Access the composite text [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap5/Q003720/] of Ashurbanipal 21.

Museum Number	Registration Number	Provenance	cpn
BM 122616 + BM 127966 (+)? BM 128073	1930-5-8,5 + 1929-10-12,622 (+)? 1929-10-12,729	Nineveh, Asn. Palace, Squares A, B, and H	c

Commentary

The inscription is written in Neo-Assyrian script and horizontal rulings separate each line of text. The non-physical join between BM 122616 + BM 127966 and BM 128073 was suggested by A.R. Millard and has been provisionally accepted here. He also proposed that BM 122613, which is dated by the post-canonical eponymy of Sîn-šarru-uṣur, may have belonged to the same clay cylinder as BM 122616+. As E. Weissert (apud Borger, BIWA p. 356) has already pointed out, this join is unlikely since BM 122613 probably bears an inscription of Sîn-šarra-iškun. Therefore, BM 122613 is edited in Part 2 as Sîn-šarra-iškun text no. 3.

Bibliography

1933 Thompson, AAA 20 pp. 105 and 107 n. 1 (line 19´, transliteration, study)

1940 Thompson, Iraq 7 pp. 106–107 and fig. 18 no. 33 (BM 122616, copy, edition)

1962 Tadmor, Proceedings of the 25th International Congress p. 240 (study)

1968 Lambert and Millard, Cat. pp. 13 and 47 (study)

1968 Millard, Iraq 30 p. 111 and pl. XXVI (BM 127966, BM 128073, copy; study)

1996 Borger, BIWA pp. 199–200 (edition)

1998 Reade, Orientalia 67 p. 257 (study)

2000 Reade, RLA 9/5–6 p. 410 §13.5 (study)

2010 Fuchs, Interkulturalität pp. 416–419 and 422–426 (line 19´, study)

Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers

Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers, 'Inscriptions on Cylinders (text no. 21)', RINAP 5: The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Aššur-etel-ilāni, and Sîn-šarra-iškun, The RINAP/RINAP 5 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2022 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap5/rinap51textintroductions/cylinderstext21/]

The RINAP 5 sub-project of the University of Pennsylvania-based RINAP Project, 2015–23. The contents of RINAP 5 are prepared in cooperation with the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), which is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007–23.
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