A Companion to Assyria
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Koch‐Westenholz, U. 2000. Babylonian Liver Omens: The Chapters Manzāzu, Padānu and Pān Tākalti of the Babylonian Extispicy Series Mainly from Aššurbanipal’s Library, CNI Publications 25, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
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Further Reading
On scribal culture in general, see Pearce 1995 and (with a focus on the relationship between kings and scholars) Frahm 2011. For useful overviews of the libraries and archives in Ashur, see Pedersén 1985–6, and 1998: 80–8, 132–43. Maul 2010 provides an excellent analysis of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family and its library. For an investigation into the possible rivalry between Assyrian and Babylonian scholars, see Heeßel 2010. Wiggermann 2008 traces the story of a particular Babylonian scholar taking refuge in Assur.
CHAPTER 21
Assyrian Scholarship and Scribal Culture in Kalu and Nineveh
Jeanette C. Fincke
Introduction
The Neo‐Assyrian period saw a profound change in the attitude of the Assyrian kings towards scholarship and scribal culture. The rulers of earlier periods had, by and large, left the responsibility of preserving scholarly knowledge to the temples and private individuals. This was the situation in Kalu (Nimrud), the Assyrian capital of the ninth and eighth century BCE. Aside from the state archives that were later moved to the new capital and the archives of the palace and city administration of Kalu (Pedersén 1998: 145–51), the only library with literary and other scholarly texts discovered in Kalu was found in the temple of Nabû, divine patron of scribes, which was called Ezida (but see also below, “Assembling tablets for Assurbanipal’s library in Nineveh,” for the library of Nabû‐zuqup‐kenu).
About 280 clay tablets and fragments were unearthed in the Ezida, largely in one room (Wiseman and Black 1996). Most of them were large library tablets with one or two columns on each side; a few had three columns (CTN IV 56, 63, 79) and one four (CTN IV 62). There were also lexical lists with more than four columns and usually only one word in each column. On smaller tablets in landscape format (i.e. written parallel to the long axis), we find excerpts and other, shorter texts (CTN IV 29, 59, 104?, 127, 149). The tablets identified so far (see Table 21.1) prove that the temple of Nabû also served as a school for teaching the scribal arts, like other temple scriptoria in the Ancient Near East. The group of school tablets (39 = 13.93 percent) from Ezida is the third largest group of texts found in this library; only the divinatory texts (ca. 90 = 32.14 percent) and the instructions for medical and magical treatments of sick people (76 = 27.14 percent) are more numerous. There are only twenty‐five (=8.93 percent) religious texts, a g
enre one would have expected to be the most essential in a temple library, revealing that priests learned their profession not by reading relevant texts but rather through oral transmission.
Table 21.1 Text genres found in the Neo‐Assyrian Libraries in Kalu, uzirina, and Nineveh (here only the ones written in Babylonian ductus)
Libraries Ezida, Temple of Nabû in Kalu Library of šangû‐priests in uzirina Assurbanipal’s Library in Nineveh: Texts in Babylonian Ductus
Text genre Number of Texts (percentage) Number of Texts (percentage) Number of Texts (percentage)
Divinatory Texts including Hemerologies ca. 90 (32.14) 40 (9.83) 728 (46.64)
(Divination reports) 1 637
Medical and Magical Treatments of Sick People 76 (27.14) 76 (18.67) 78 (5.00)
Religious Texts Prayers and Hymns 19 (6.79) 51 (12.53) 135 (8.65)
Ritual Texts and Incantations 6 (2.14) 108 (26.53) 237 (15.18)
Various Religious Texts 202 (12.94)
Literary Texts 11 (3.93) 52 (12.78) 44 (2.82)
Miscellaneous 21 (7.50) 19 (4.67) 22 (1.41)
School Texts 39 (13.93) 28 (6.88) 56 (3.58)
Fragments ca. 18 (6.43) 33 (8.11) 59 (3.78)
Total ca. 280 (100) 407 (100) 1,561 (100)
The purpose of the library was to preserve the knowledge of the past and to maintain scholarship and scribal culture. The library facilitated engagement in divination, which was not only considered a means to see into and influence the future (see below, “The growing role of divination and scholarship for the Neo‐Assyrian kings”) but, at the same time, was also regarded as a science (Maul 2003). Divination started to become a text‐based endeavor in the early second millennium BCE, a development that intensified after 1500 BCE, especially in the peripheral areas of Mesopotamia. There, people learned Akkadian as a foreign language by following the Mesopotamian school curriculum, in which divinatory texts formed the largest (attuša: 35.31 percent, Emar: 60.77 percent) or the second largest (Ugarit: 20.97 percent) group of texts within the corpus of Akkadian and Sumerian compositions of Mesopotamian origin (Fincke 2012).
In the temple library of Nabû in Kalu, there is clear proof that Babylonian scholars played a certain part in the scholarly discourse. Fourteen tablets of the temple library are written in Babylonian ductus (5 percent), including three school texts. Moreover, one of the scribes, who served as the “royal scribe” of Adad‐nirari III (810–783 BCE) and had very elegant Assyrian handwriting, was the son of Babilaiu, “the Babylonian.”
Libraries of Neo‐Assyrian Scholars and Temples
In addition to temple libraries, there were private libraries created by individual scholars. In a letter to King Esarhaddon (680–669 BCE) written around 670 BCE, the king’s exorcist Adad‐šumu‐uṣur apologizes for not having answered the king’s inquiry earlier because he was occupied with other duties in the palace, and then says, “the writing‐board was in my house. Now then, I can check the writing‐board and extract the relevant interpretation” (SAA X 202 obv. 10–13). One particularly well‐known private library from the Neo‐Assyrian period, besides that of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family in Ashur (see Chapter 20), is that of a family of šangû‐priests in uzirina (Sultantepe), in the west of the Assyrian empire in modern Turkey. According to the colophons of the tablets, the priests created this library between 718 BCE and 612 BCE, in the final period of the Assyrian empire. They produced large library tablets with one or two columns on each side, smaller tablets with excerpts, and a few landscape‐format tablets. The only tablets with more than two columns were lexical lists. The more than 400 unbaked tablets from the Sultantepe library were found next to the outer wall of a private house, provisionally hidden behind large wine‐jars and stones. Towards the end of the empire, the situation for Assyrians living in remote districts of the empire might have become so dangerous that the owners decided to abandon their home, and these tablets might have been left in the street because the process of moving the library was interrupted by military attacks.
The composition of the library of the šangû‐priests in uzirina differs considerably from the temple library of Nabû in Kalu (see Table 21.1). In uzirina, most of the texts (159 = 39.06 percent) are religious, followed (as in Kalu) by instructions for medical and magical treatments of sick people (76 = 18.67 percent), and then by literary texts (52 = 12.78 percent). The school texts, although fewer in number (28 = 6.88 percent), provide evidence for scribal education within this intellectual environment. But the library was focused primarily on the professional needs of its owners and not as much on representing the complete knowledge of the time as was the case with the Ezida temple library in Kalu. The number of tablets written in Babylonian ductus is significantly smaller than in the Ezida (6 = 1.47 percent). However, since the tablets excavated seem to represent only a part of the library, the overall picture might change considerably if the remaining tablets were ever found.
The Growing Role of Divination and Scholarship for the Neo‐Assyrian Kings
Towards the end of the eighth century BCE, a change in the attitude of the Assyrian kings towards scholarship can be observed. Around this time, the kings began to focus more and more strongly on the detailed knowledge of their scholars in order to enhance and maintain their royal power (Pongratz‐Leisten 1999). According to the general belief, gods decided not only the general fates of everyone and everything on earth, but also determined every minute event in every person’s day‐to‐day life. Knowing the gods’ plans beforehand, therefore, meant knowing the future. This knowledge enabled the initiate to prepare himself for events to come, or even to prevent a bad prediction and thus influence the future (Maul 1994, 2003). Rulers with access to divinatory knowledge tried to use it to avoid military and political failure and to be always victorious and powerful. Obviously, they relied on scholars who were able to interpret the ominous signs by which gods indicated their plans.
According to the available sources, Sargon II (721–705 BCE) was the first Neo‐Assyrian ruler who paid massive attention to the potential of divination. He especially focused on celestial signs, which are interpreted in the omen series enūma anu enlil (Wiseman 1955, SAA VIII 501, SAA XV 5). Sennacherib (704–681 BCE), Esarhaddon (680–669 BCE), and Assurbanipal (668–631 BCE) were in constant contact with numerous diviners and exorcists, either in person or by correspondence, in order to detect every possible sign wherever it appeared and to discuss an appropriate course of action. They also consulted specialists in hemerology about the most suitable times for various actions in the cultic, military, and private spheres. A hemerology distinctively composed for the Assyrian ruler, called inbu bēl ari, “Fruit, Lord of the Month,” is mentioned in a letter to Esarhaddon (SAA X 221 rev. 7, written 669 BCE).
In order to receive as much information as possible about potentially ominous events, especially celestial ones, the Assyrian kings hired Assyrian and Babylonian diviners “to keep the watch” for them in different places within the empire and to report to them their observations. The cities that are named are Ashur, Nineveh, Arbaʾil, and Kalzu in Assyria, as well as Borsippa, Kutha, Uruk, Dilbat, Babylon, and Nippur in Babylonia (Oppenheim 1969: 101–7). As a result, a steady flow of reports and letters must have come to the palace in Nineveh (Kuyunjik), the Assyrian capital after 704 BCE. At present, about 567 such reports (SAA VIII) and 402 related letters (SAA X, SAA XVI 157–74) have been identified. The reports and letters were not dated by the sender but the content can indicate the time of composition. Of the datable material, all but one of the reports (SAA VIII 501 dates back to 708 BCE) and all of the relevant letters were written during a thirty‐three year period from 680–648 BCE. Of the 120 datable reports written to Esarhaddon and to Assurbanipal, the majority (seventy‐two) were for Esarhaddon (SAA VIII: XXI–XXII) and he received an even greater proportion (201 from a total of 247) of the relevant letters (SAA X: XXIX). Esarhaddon is said to have developed a daily routine to deal with the vast amounts of inc
oming information:
They used to receive and introduce all reports from the astrologers into the presence of the father of the king, my lord. Afterwards, a man whom the father of the king, my lord, knew used to read them to the king in a qersu (a private garden) on the riverbank. Nowadays it should be done as it (best) suits the king, my lord.
(SAA X 76 obv. 11 – rev. 9, written to Assurbanipal in 667 BCE)
Several specialists were appointed in various places at the same time with the same task – to send their reports to the king – so that the possibility of fraud was minimized. But fraud still happened. The Babylonian scholar Bel‐ušezib wrote to Esarhaddon:
In the reign of your royal father (i.e. Sennacherib), Kalbu the son of Nabû‐eṭir, without the knowledge of your royal father, made a pact [with] scribes and haruspices, saying: “if an untoward sign occurs, we shall [tell] the king that an obscure sign has occurred.” Whenever an untoward sign occurred, they interpreted tablet for tablet the [evil] away.
(SAA X 109 rev. 1–3)
This conspiracy came to light when the alû‐demon seized Sennacherib and the king reproached the diviners: “[a sign] that is untoward to me occurs and you do not report it to me […]” (rev. 6–7). Bel‐ušezib informs Esarhaddon that, even under his reign, diviners had been “looking for an auspicious sign […, saying]: ‘Keep evil [ominous signs] to yourself’” (SAA X 109 rev. 12–13). He himself, however, Bel‐ušezib claims, is of course trustworthy and reports every single ominous sign, regardless of its meaning. Esarhaddon was alerted and, in the following period, if no report was sent to him for a while, made unpleasant inquiries (SAA X 45; 670 BCE). Consequently, scholars started to report everything that could feasibly be relevant, even on occasions when they were unable to see the night sky because of clouds (SAA X 138, 139). A system of reviewing reports developed that helped to avoid mistakes. Ignoramuses who mixed up stars and sent incorrect reports were thus easily exposed (SAA X 51, 72, 172).