Uruk: Spatbabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadral U l, Teil V.

• Author: Michalowski, Piotr
• Position: Review

Uruk: Spatbabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadrat U l, Teil V. By EGBERT VON WEIHER. Augrabungen in Uruk Warka: Endberichte, vol. 13. Mainz: PHILIPP VON ZABERN, 1998. Pp. vii + 199. DM 120.

During the 1969 and 1970-71 campaigns in the great southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk, archaeologists from the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut discovered a large number of Late Babylonian literary texts. Over the years Professor von Weiher has published four volumes of texts from these finds, and now with the current volume five, he offers us the final installment of these cuneiform tablets. Only small fragments remain unpublished in the Iraq Museum. Following the pattern established in earlier volumes, von Weiher provides hand copies of most of the pieces, transliterations, translations, and short commentaries on the texts, with indexes of words discussed, as well as of divine, place, and personal names. The ninety-three tablets, numbered cumulatively within the series as 224-317, comprise a wide range of textual types, including miscellaneous literary compositions, myths, incantations, medical and omen texts, commentaries, lexical and mathematical exercises as well as economic documents, The latter (nos. 283-315) span the time from the eleventh year of Nebuchadnezzar II through the tenth year of Seleucus I. Although this volume is clearly a mopping-up operation of left-over materials, there are many tantalizing fragments here that will tax the ingenuity of scholars for years to come. Among these one should note, for...