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Studies in Mesopotamian Lapidary Inscriptions. III1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
Extract
In 1891, B. T. A. Evetts published three black diorite artefacts from the British Museum: a Middle Babylonian kudurru fragment, a Gudea door socket, and a piece of a mortar dedicated by Eanatum to the goddess Nanshe. All three were found together in the ruins of some old London houses, and Evetts speculates that they were possibly brought to London in the seventeenth century by merchants who shipped them from Basra either as ballast or as objects of curiosity.
The Eanatum fragment (Plate IV) is what remains of a mortar whose bowl was approximately 39 cm in diameter. Two inscribed sides, at right angles to the top surface into which the bowl of the mortar is sunk, and at slightly wider than right angles to each other, are partially preserved. These sides are not perfectly plane, but undulate slightly, and are polished, as is the top and the bowl. The rounded edges separating the two inscribed sides from each other and from the top are unpolished, and may have been so in antiquity, or the originally polished surface of the edges may have eroded from friction, as did part of col. i of side IV along the top edge.
The reconstruction of the original that most readily suggests itself is a parallelepiped, with the bowl resembling a rough circle inscribed in a parallelogram, and four sides formed by the downward projection of the parallelogram, two of which are the partially preserved inscribed sides. Presumably, the other two sides would have been inscribed as well. The inscription is arranged in five columns per side, running parallel to the top edge. Beneath the fifth column on each preserved side, the surface is polished but uninscribed, and there is 3–5 cm of polished blank surface between the inscribed columns and the edge that separates the two preserved sides.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1984
Footnotes
1
See JCS 32 (1980), 114 ff., and RA 74 (1980), 101 ff. This research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
References
2 Steible, H. and Behrens, H., Die altsumerische Bauund Weihinschriften (ABW) I, 172 ff.Google Scholar; Cooper, J., Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions (SARI) I, La 3.11Google Scholar.
3 PSBA 13 (1891), 54 ffGoogle Scholar.
4 Thanks to Ken Uprichard, Christopher Walker and Dominique Collon for their advice and assistance in the examination and measurement of the piece. Photos are reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
5 SAK, 28k.
6 The one exception is the mention of the votive object in Urn. 35 before the summary of the king's deeds. The curses in the Stela of the Vultures' oaths are not comparable.
7 See also the placement of the clause in Ent. 28 (before the concluding prayer and curse), and Ent. 45 (before the u4-ba clause).
8 Although Steible and Behrens, ABW, correctly report that I had estimated far shorter column lengths for this side after an initial collation, a second collation convinced me that my first estimates were inaccurate given the original diameter of the bowl.
9 For the fixity and order of Eanatum's historical narrations, see Cooper, , SAME 2/1 (1983), 25Google Scholar.
10 Curses are rare in Presargonic inscriptions. Aside from the repeated oath—curse sequences in the Stela of the Vultures, they occur only in Ean. 63 (+)?, Ent. 30, Ent. 28, Ukg. 16 and the Frontier of Shara (ABW, Luzag. 2).
11 We expect ba-sum-ma, or should we read sum-mu-ba?
12 See Cooper, , SANE 2/1, 7Google Scholar.
13 Steible and Behrens, ABW, Lukin. v. Uruk 3; Sollberger and Kupper, IRSA, IE1b; Cooper, SARI I, Uk 1.6.
14 For the difficulties in harmonizing the writings of this name, see ABW II, 298 f. I now prefer to interpret the southern writing lugal-ki-NI:ŠÈ-du7-du7, as lugal-ki-gi7,-né-du7-du7, despite the obvious difficulties this entails.
15 See Cooper, , SANE 2/1, 34Google Scholar.
16 The photo is reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
17 Compare the forms of KIŠ assembled by Goetze, , JCS 15 (1961), 110Google Scholar.
18 ABW, Uḫb. v. Kiš 1; IRSA, IA2a; Goetze, , JCS 15 (1961), 107Google Scholar.
19 The details will be presented in Expedition by Erle Leichty.
20 Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
21 That is, the last line is k[iški], and not ŠÁR X DIŠ[ki].