Monthly Archives: December 2007

Charles Halton

Annotated Bibliography of ANE Music

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I just stumbled across (I actually was googling to see if I could happen to find this article: Dennis Pardee, 2006, « Textes akkadiens d’Ugarit », Syria 81 (2004) [paru 2006], p. 249-62.; go figure!) a very nice bibliography concerning music in Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria and related areas including Ugarit, Syria, Elam, and Israel. The bibliography treats music theory, musical texts, instruments, etc. It is dated July 2006 so it’s pretty current. If you are interested in this topic you will want to consult the brand new and very fine volume:

Les Musiciens et la musique d'après les archives de Mari

Les Musiciens et la musique d’après les archives de Mari
Mémoires de NABU 10
Florilegium Marianum (Memoires de N.A.B.U.) – FM 9
by N. Ziegler
SEPOA: Societe pour l’Etude du Proche-Orient Ancien,
350 pages, French
Paper
Your Price: $109.00
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~ZIEMUSICI

Charles Halton

A Couple More Articles on Ancient Authorship and Literacy

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A few posts ago I mentioned an article by Livingstone concerning literacy within the Neo-Assyrian court. Here are a few more articles (that are FREE to download no less!–here’s the link, the articles are listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name) that are worth your while and deal with authorship or literacy:

Ben Foster discusses Mesopotamian views of authorship which were markedly different than our modern ones: Foster, B.R., ‘On authorship in Akkadian literature’, Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 51 (1991), 17-32.

Simo Parpola publishes an extraordinary text that shows that a military commander was functionally literate enough to write to a mayor in order to ask him to send a scribe: Parpola, S., ‘The man without a scribe and the question of literacy in the Assyrian empire’, in B. Pongratz-Leisten et al. (eds.), Ana Å¡adî Labnāni lÅ« allik: Festschrift für Wolfgang Röllig (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 247), Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997, pp. 315-324.

Charles Halton

He’d Make a Babylonian Diviner Proud

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James Spinti has a link to a story about a modern day extispacist who uses pig spleens to forecast the weather. I don’t have a volume handy that presents cuneiform manuals on extispacy, but it would be interesting to compare the North Dakota farmer’s “instructions” to those of the Babylonians:

If the spleen is wide where it attaches to the pig’s stomach and then narrows, it means winter weather will come early with a mild spring, Smokov said. A narrow-to-wider spleen usually means harsh weather in the spring, he said.

The spleens obtained by Smokov this year are pretty uniform in thickness, which means no drastic changes.

A spokesman for the National Weather Service has a very bizzare evaluation of this technique:

At the National Weather Service office in Bismarck, meteorologist Vic Jensen relies on Doppler radar and other sophisticated scientific instruments. But he is charitable toward folk methods such as Smokov’s.

“I can’t discount some of these kinds of theories,” Jensen said. “It’s just another way for people to forecast what’s going to happen.”

Wow, it’s not like I put a lot of stock into weather forecasts to begin with, but after this comment I have even less confidence in them. Especially when you combine this “charitable” outlook with the last paragraph of the news report:

The weather service’s three-month outlook is typically at least 60 percent accurate, Jensen said.

Nice, slightly over half right–way to go guys! All the millions of dollars in radars and satellites have surely paid off. Maybe we should just pocket the money and start flipping coins or cutting open pig bellies…

Charles Halton

Locating God at the Mall

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In an effort to locate God, and overcome our fear of time, we collect stuff at the mall or on some other quest. But eventually we grow bored with what we have collected and throw it out or destroy it. If we did this only with commodities, perhaps it would not be such a problem–although the shortage of landfills across the United States is an increasingly troublesome dilemma. But we also grow bored with and discard artwork. We grow bored with and discard places. We grow bored with and discard people, marriages, traditions. It is this latter tendency especially–to be blind to how our desires to acquire cause us to destroy–that is the most troubling aspect of the American turn to a theology of places. 1

I hope this year that you look for God in places other than the mall. Blessings.


  1. Jon Paul, Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces: Putting God in Place, Brazos Press, 2003: 44-45 [back]
Charles Halton

Cuneiform Records

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Through a Google search I stumbled upon the website for Cuneiform Records–they appear to be a normal contemporary recording company and they don’t recreate ancient music or anything.  They have a cool picture/logo–it is something that looks like a stele with three levels of cuneiform writing although I can’t make out anything intelligible (although the writing is a bit faint and I can’t find an enlarged pic).  Also, they have another logo/brand mark beside the name of the company that looks like an “A” sign however the sign looks like it is rotated 90 degrees to the right– from the ductus of the wedges it appears that the sign was written from right to left and I am not aware of this orientation.  Cool name for a record company though!

Charles Halton

Alasdair Livingstone–Ashurbanipal: literate or not?

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Were people in the royal court, particularly Ashurbanipal himself, literate or not?  This is the question that Alasdair Livingstone addresses in his article, Ashurbanipal: literate or not? (Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 97 (2007): 98-118).  Previous scholars have been on both sides of this question (e.g. Parpola and Lieberman are more optimistic about royal literacy while Pongratz-Leisten is more pessimistic).

Livingstone believes that Ashurbanipal and others within the royal court were literate (we must keep in mind that there are different levels of literacy and Livingstone does not advocate that the royal court were all top-notch expert scribes).  Livingstone brings some very fascinating new collations and texts to his treatment of this topic.

One of the most fascinating new collations of this article concerns a “royal memo” from the king’s eldest daughter, Sheru’a-etirat to her sister-in-law, Libbi-ali-sharrat:

Why don’t you write your tablets and recite your exercise, or people will say “Is this the sister of Sheru’a-etirat, the eldest daughter of the succession palace of Assur-etel-ilani-mukinni, the great king, the legitimate king, king of the world, king of Assyria?”  And you are a daughter-in-law, the lady of the house of Ashurbanipal, the great crown prince of the house of succession of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria.

This new translation indicates that there was not court rivalry between these two women at this time (as Amelie Kuhrt indicates in her ANE history).  Also, according to Livingstone:

Libbi-ali-sharrat is letting her sister-in-law and her husband down by not studying, by not writing her tablets and reciting her lesson.  This is of course negative evidence of literacy.  The princess was not writing her tablets or reciting her lesson.  But the memo demonstrates extremely clearly that there was an expectation that she should be doing lessons.  And if this was the case, it would be surprising if other young people at the royal court were not similarly expected to learn to read and write.

I have a feeling that literacy, while certainly not something that the average person attained, was more common in the royal court, priestly caste, and military ranks than the scholarly consensus.  Every now and then evidence seems to bubble up to give hints to this and I think that Livingstone’s article is the latest example.

What do you think of ancient literacy in general and the Neo-Assyrian court in particular?

Charles Halton

In Memoriam, Jean Bottéro 1914-2007

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“Françoise Bottéro, sa fille, Alain Bottéro et Claire Verlet, son fils
et sa belle-fille, Stéphane et Milena, ses petits-enfants,
Marie-Claude et Jean-Michel Pedelucq, ses amis, Pascale Verlet, qui
l’a soigné ont la tristesse d’annoncer le décès de Jean Bottéro,
survenu à son domicile, à Gif-sur-Yvette, le 15 décembre 2007. Il a
inhumé dans l’intimité familiale, le jeudi 20 décembre, au cimetière
de la Drêche (Tarn), où il a rejoin Pény.”

From Jack Sasson via Agade list.

Bottéro was a very fine scholar; I have used many of his writings with great profit.  He will be missed.

Charles Halton

Beer–Finally, A Translation That Gets It Right!

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I read an interview with the head editor of the Holman Christian Standard Bible and he had this to say:

Here’s an interesting one. You’ll find that very few translations have this correct. ESV, NIV, a lot of them use the expression “strong drink.” Most people think “strong drink” is whiskey or rum or gin or something like that, but distillation was not discovered until the 9th century ad. So our translation correctly translates it “beer.”

It’s about time!  I’m pretty tired of reading “strong drink” in translations since we have known for a long time that shekar is beer, plain and simple.  We don’t know a lot about how beer was made from ancient Hebrew sources, but we know quite a bit about it from Akkadian.  If you’re interested in this topic here’s where to find all you want to know about shikaru:

  • L.F. Hartman and A.L. Oppenheim, On Beer and Brewing Techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia (Baltimore 1950) (= JAOS Suppl. 10).
  • W. Röllig, Das Bier im alten Mesopotamien (Berlin 1970).
Charles Halton

Would Bernard Duhm Get Tenure Today? Probably Not.

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One of the biggest figures in the study of the prophets in the late 1800′s/early 1900′s was Bernard Duhm. In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s the guy who separated Isaiah into the major collections of chapters 1-39, 40-55, and 56-66. Before his commentary on Isaiah in which he presented his arguments for the division of the book, in 1875 he wrote a theology of the prophets entitled, Die Theologie der Propheten. However, he did not publish ANYTHING, not even an article or short note, for 17 years until the first edition of his Isaiah commentary came out.

So, do you think Duhm would get tenure today? Probably not. Maybe we need to rethink setting page count minimums and such in tenure reviews. Sometimes good ideas need time to percolate. Furthermore, I think there are too many writings of bad quality constantly being churned out–this might be partly explained because young scholars are fearful of falling short of publishing minimums and they put out stuff that they might not otherwise.

So, what would change with tenure reviews?