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Two New Seal-Inscriptions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
The seal-inscriptions published here have been chosen as a fitting, albeit very modest, tribute to Professor Gurney as they both have a faint Hurrian flavour. One appears on the seal of a royal scribe bearing a Hurrian name; the other gives us the name of a new king of Ḫaraḫar, a place currently located in a Hurrian, or Human-influenced, region and whose only hitherto known king bore the Hurrian name, Ankiš-atal. The seals will be fully published by Dr D. Collon in a forthcoming volume of the Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in The British Museum: only the inscriptions are therefore discussed in these pages.
1. BM 102055 = 1905-12-9,3 is a seal of the in-na-ba-type characteristic of the later part of the Third Dynasty of Ur and lingering on into the following period, but it shows clear signs of re-use. The legend (in Akkadian, judging by line 2) reads.
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- Copyright © The British Institute at Ankara 1980
References
1 Normally written GÁN-ḫar ki. The reading is given by three occurrences of the syllabic spelling ḫa-ra-ḫar ki: Gelb, Hurrians & Subarians, 57, n. 72 ( = Edzard & Farber, Rép. géogr. 2, 91); Sollberger, MVN 5, 140; and a tablet in a London private collection. (For a spelling ending in -ra, see Kramer Anniversary Volume, 449.)
2 See Gelb and Edzard & Farber, Il. cc.
3 On the reading of the name, see Sollberger, & Kupper, , IRSA, 169. WhitingGoogle Scholar, JCS 28, 173 ff.Google Scholar, reads the name Tiš-atal and suggests that the king may be identified with Tiš-atal of Urkiš and Nawar (Parrot & Nougayrol, RA 42, 1 ff.) and one Tiš-atal of Nineveh. If this could be proved, one would, of course, have to accept the interpretation of AN as the classifier “god”, as well as the emendation of KI into DI.
4 Cylinder Seals, II: Akkadian to Ur III Periods.
5 Greenstone facies; 3·25 × 1·5 cm. Collon, Catalogue, no. 451.
6 Sollberger, , JCS 19, 29 f.Google Scholar; Franke, J. A. in Gibson, & Biggs, , Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East, 61 ffGoogle Scholar.
7 Note the last line written smaller and outside the frame, and the traces of signs from the original inscription in lines 3 and 4.
8 Note perhaps the elements anz(a/i)- and -zunna listed in Gelb & al., NPN. AN may be part of the name or the classifier “god”: in the absence of clear evidence I prefer to leave the question open. The consonants in ZA, BA and zu are, of course, uncertain.
9 As.T.223 (now lost), found in Room 0.30:12 of the Itūriya temple, below the Bilalama level: see OIP 43, 146 (no. 13) and 255.
10 A Xerox-copy of which was kindly sent to me by Dr. R. M. Whiting to whom Professor Gelb had shown my first, tentative, transliteration of the B.M. seal-inscription.
11 For the statements in this paragraph see Jacobsen, , OIP 43, 134 ff.Google Scholar; Sollberger, & Kupper, , IRSA, IIID2 and IVEGoogle Scholar.
12 See n. 9 above.
13 Lapis-lazuli; 3·05 × 1·85 cm. Collon, Catalogue, no. 472.—I read a short notice on this seal at the 24th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (Paris, 1977).
14 This is usually described as a multiple mace, surely as efficient a weapon as the celebrated “four-bladed axe” (cf. Sollberger, & Kupper, , IRSA, 127, n. 2Google Scholar). I prefer to see in it a kinetographic representation of a sling-and-slingstone being whirled before shooting. (I was happy to see that Lambert, W. G., Iraq 41, 9 fGoogle Scholar. had reached a similar conclusion though describing the weapon as a club. Not also that the figure whirling the weapon is not always a lion-man or a god, and that it does appear before the Old-Babylonian period.)
15 In places it has also been rubbed down to the point of illegibility. No copy could have faithfully reproduced it in its present state and therefore none is given; but the transliteration offered here, the result of repeated spells of close scrutiny of the original and three impressions of varying quality, is, on the whole, fairly certain.
16 The Hurrian element anza- (see n. 8 above) would then be irrelevant. The consonants in ZA and DA are uncertain.
17 Perhaps “the … of his god”?
18 Perhaps “servant”?
19 I fail to understand this passage for which I can find no parallel.
20 For lines 16–21 cf. the Narām-Suen (?) inscription Thureau-Dangin, RA 9, 34, Obv. ii: … da-núm, lugal a-kà-dè kiù ki-ib-ra-tim ar-ba-im, mu-ut dinana …