Aramaic and Figural Stamp Impressions on Bricks of the Sixth Century B.C. from Babylon.

• Author: Millard, Alan
• Position: Book review

Aramaic and Figural Stamp Impressions on Bricks of the. Sixth Century B.c. from Babylon. By BENJAMIN SASS and JOACHIM MARZAHN. Ausgrabungen in Babylon, vol. 10; Wissenschaftliche Veroffent-lichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, vol. 127. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2010. Pp. 259, illus. [euro] 72.

Myriads of bricks were made for building Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon and thousands of them were stamped with the king's name in cuneiform characters. A smaller number were stamped with Aramaic letters. Occasionally examples of those were discovered and illustrated during the nineteenth century, as early as 1801, and then the German excavations at Babylon (1899-1917) found many more. Robert Koldewey illustrated a selection in various reports and in Das wiedererstehende Babylon (1925). Yet no major examination of them took place until Benjamin Sass's simple request for a photograph of one brick in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in 1991 led to collaboration with Joachim Marzahn there and to this handsome volume. Now their detailed catalogue enables the significance of the bricks to be evaluated. The authors located 144 examples in Berlin, eight in Istanbul, three each in the British Museum and the Louvre, and one in Philadelphia, with a few that cannot he located. Each stamp is described and every example illustrated with photographs and/or drawings (pp. 19-148). Chapters are devoted to every aspect of the bricks with Aramaic letters or other designs and there are comprehensive indices.

The stamps were impressed on normal Babylonian building bricks, seventy percent of them on bricks also bearing cuneiform stamps mostly from Nebuchadnezzar's reign. two each from the reigns of Neriglissar and Nabonidus, giving a span of some sixty years for their production. Marzahn illustrates and describes the cuneiform inscriptions (chapter 2, pp. 1.9-39), observing differences between eleven stamps of Nebuchadnezzar: some apparently imprinted from dies cut in wood (no. 1), in metal (nos. 3. 4), and perhaps from movable type (no. 2).

The Aramaic stamps are more varied. Some were made from dies with the letters in relief, so incuse on the bricks. others from dies with letters engraved so that they are in relief on the bricks--unlike the cuneiform brick stamps, but attested by a fragment of an Aramaic stamp found at Hamath, as the discussion of "Inscribed and Impressed Bricks" notes (p. 11).

Sass offers a detailed study of the script of the Aramaic stamps (pp...