Simo Parpola

The first half of Assurbanipal’s long reign (668–ca. 630 BCE) was a time of peace and great prosperity and political success for Assyria. But towards the middle of his reign a serious crisis broke out in Babylonia, unleashing a long, bitter and destructive conflict between Assyria, Elam and Babylonia, which was to shake the very foundations of the Empire. Less than a year after Assurbanipal had achieved a crushing victory over Elam, annexed the country to his realm and was at the apex of his political power, his brother Šamaš-šumu-ukin, installed years before as a puppet king in Babylon, rebelled with the aid of Elam and the Chaldean and Aramean tribes of Babylonia. The revolt was crushed only five years later, leaving Babylon in ruins and sowing insidious rancor and hate among its citizens; the conflict with Elam went on for three more years.

The internal stability and cohesion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to a very considerable degree rested on the public image of the King as an omnipotent earthly representative of God. Many elaborate rituals were designed and performed in order to promote this image and firmly implant it in the minds of the king's subjects, vassals and enemies. The corpus of royal rituals known to us includes a long series of ritual acts to be performed by the king in the temples of A┼ ┼ ur, I┼ tar and other gods; rituals performed during the New Year's festival and other seasonal festivals in front of audiences consisting of domestic and foreign dignitaries as well as common people; coronation, battle and victory rituals; rituals designed to secure the continuity of the royal line; a protocol for the royal dinner; directions for performing the daily liturgy in Assyrian temples, and so on. The present volume is a critical edition of all currently known Assyrian royal rituals and related cultic texts written in the Neo-Assyrian language. Many of these texts are previously unpublished or inadequately edited, and very few of them have been previously translated into English. They constitute an extremely important source for the study of Assyrian religion, cult and royal ideology and ancient Near Eastern religion and cult in general.

The internal stability and cohesion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to a very considerable degree rested on the public image of the King as an omnipotent earthly representative of God. Many elaborate rituals were designed and performed in order to promote this image and firmly implant it in the minds of the king's subjects, vassals and enemies. The corpus of royal rituals known to us includes a long series of ritual acts to be performed by the king in the temples of Aššur, Ištar and other gods; rituals performed during the New Year's festival and other seasonal festivals in front of audiences consisting of domestic and foreign dignitaries as well as common people; coronation, battle and victory rituals; rituals designed to secure the continuity of the royal line; a protocol for the royal dinner; directions for performing the daily liturgy in Assyrian temples, and so on. The present volume is a critical edition of all currently known Assyrian royal rituals and related cultic texts written in the Neo-Assyrian language. Many of these texts are previously unpublished or inadequately edited, and very few of them have been previously translated into English. They constitute an extremely important source for the study of Assyrian religion, cult and royal ideology and ancient Near Eastern religion and cult in general.

After many unsuccessful attempts to establish its linguistic affinity, Sumerian is nowadays widely considered a language isolate without any known relatives. However, a systematic comparison of its vocabulary and morphology with all the major Eurasiatic language families establishes beyond doubt that Sumerian belongs to the Uralic language family and is distantly related also to many other languages currently spoken in Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. This etymological dictionary brings together the lexical evidence associating Sumerian with the Uralic family, along with comparative data from five other language families (Indo-European, Altaic, Kartvelian, Elamite-Dravidian and Afro-Asiatic). Part 1 presents Uralic etymologies for 3030 Sumerian words and lexical morphemes accounting for about two-thirds of the Sumerian core vocabulary, as well as an introduction assessing the linguistic affinity of Sumerian. Part 2 contains a semantic analysis of the Sumerian and Uralic lexical material, indexes to Part 1, and an introduction discussing the origins and arrival of Sumerians in Mesopotamia on the basis of epigraphic, linguistic, archaeological and physical anthropological evidence. The relevant data have never before been put together, let alone analyzed, and they open revolutionary new perspectives to the origins and prehistory of the Sumerians and the Uralic and Indo-European language families.

Eisenbrauns is pleased to announce this quality reprint of Simo Parpola’s classic work, Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal.

Eisenbrauns is pleased to announce this quality reprint of Simo Parpola’s classic work, Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. “Part II: Commentary and Appendices” originally appeared in 1983 as AOAT 5/2

This volume is a continuation of the publication of the correspondence of Sargon II begun in SAA 1. The letters published in this volume are of special interest because of the particular geographical area from which they originate. This area extends, in the shape of a broad crescent, roughly from the Euphrates of the Diyala river, surround and enclosing the Mesopotamian plain to the north and to the NE. From the geographical point of view, the various territories which lie in this wide area all share a common feature: they represent the transition from the alluvial plain or the piedmont to the highlands of Anatolia and Iran, such as the eastern Taurus or the Zagros chain.

The State Archives of Assyria project is an ambitious computerized program that aims to present the entire extant corpus of Neo-Assyrian texts in transliteration and translation. The present volume is one of four to be devoted to the correspondence of Sargon, founder of the last imperial dynasty of Assyria, and his officials. 258 letters are treated, many of which have previously appeared only in cuneiform copies; three fragments were hitherto quite unpublished. The text editions—transliterations and translations side by side, with a minimum of apparatus criticus—are liberally interspersed with photographs and line-drawings of basreliefs from various Assyrian palaces, which illustrate passages in the correspondence. A glossary introduces the various indexes. The volume closes with autograph collations of difficult or broken passages.