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Some ghost facts from Achaemenid Babylonian texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2013

Matthew W. Stolper
Matthew W. Stolper
Affiliation:
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
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Extract

The remarks below on UET 4 193 aim to correct the published accounts of that text in response to inquiries about its chronological implications. The long epigraphic comments are necessary to explain what might otherwise seem to readers unfamiliar with cuneiform script to be a suspiciously sharp discrepancy in interpretation. I take the occasion to append comments on two other ‘ghost facts’, a term meant as an analogy to ‘ghost words’.

Type
Notes
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 108 , November 1988 , pp. 196 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1988

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References

1 Cited by Parker, and Dubberstein, , Babylonian Chronology (Providence 1956) 17Google Scholar, described in Pinches el al., Late Babylonian astronomical and related texts (Providence 1955) xxxi, No. *1419Google Scholar and still unpublished. The tablet was displayed at the British Museum in 1985 as part of the exhibition ‘Halley's Comet in History.’ I am indebted to C. B. F. Walker for the text of the excerpt given here.

2 UET 4 = Figulla, H. H., Business documents of the New-Babylonian Period, Ur Excavations, Texts, vol. iv (London 1949)Google Scholar. Horn and Woods (9 n. 24) acknowledge a translation of UET 4 193 supplied by Oppenheim without saying that Oppenheim endorsed Figulla's reading of the text's chronological information. Oppenheim's review of UET 4 (Journal of Cuneiform Studies iv [1950] 188–195Google Scholar) did not comment on the chronological issue.

3 See Driel, G. Van in Achaemenid history i: sources, structures and synthesis, Proceedings of the Groningen 1983 Achaemenid History Workshop, ed. by Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. (Leiden 1987) 164–7Google Scholar.

4 OECT 10 = McEwan, G. J. P., Late Babylonian texts in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, vol. x (1984)Google Scholar. For OECT 10 185 see Graziani, S., I Testi Mesopotamia datati at regno di Serse, Suppl. 47 to Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 46 (1986) 102 fGoogle Scholar. no. 80. The text stipulates that a debt is to be repaid in the seventh month, implying that it was drafted earlier in the year. In OECT 10 326 (day 9, month 1, year 21), the ruler's name is not indicated, but for reasons of prosopography this text is probably also to be assigned to the last year of Xerxes’ reign.