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Tablets from the Sippar Library, I. The “Weidner Chronicle”: A Supposititious Royal Letter concerning a Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Extract

The literary composition known to Assyriologists as the “Weidner Chronicle” has been edited most recently by A. K. Grayson. I. L. Finkel has published the texts of a small fragment of a bilingual version (almost certainly a back-translation into Sumerian of an Akkadian original) and another small fragment. A preliminary description of the exciting discovery at Sippar of a complete Neo-Babylonian temple library with the tablets in situ on the shelves has been given in an earlier number of this journal. Among the tablets found in the library was a complete manuscript of the “Weidner Chronicle”. The tablet (which measures 14.4 × 11.4 × 2.4 cm) was found on the floor of the library and may originally have fallen from the shelves. It contained the whole text of the composition, but is extensively damaged. The scribe, Marduk-eṭir, also indicated that he was copying from a damaged original: he has marked hīpi, “break” in various places, and, quite exceptionally, has attempted by careful and deliberate cross-hatching on the tablet (e.g. lines 1, 31–3, rev. 20–3) and diagrammatic triangles (rev. 31–38) to represent explicitly the cracks, damage or breaks in the exemplar from which he was copying. It is quite clear that these marks are intentional and not subsequent damage. The colophon (hal-qa gur) requests return of the tablet if it is lost. This manuscript is obviously the product of a scholar.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1990

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References

1 Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (TCS 5; Locust Valley, 1975)Google Scholar, Chronicle 19.

2 JCS 32 (1980), pp. 72 ffGoogle Scholar.

3 Iraq 49 (1987), pp. 248 ffGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 Cf. Hunger, Kolophone, nos. 91, 96 and 97.

5 For convenience the middle chronology is followed here.

6 By Professor Claus Wilcke.

7 As implied also by Grayson, op. cit., pp. 43–45.