2. Nebuchadnezzar’s Chronicle … See Grayson 1975: 99–102. Such records were kept accessible long after their time. In Ezra 4, a sabotage letter sent to the Persian king Artaxerxes in Babylon by persons wishing to stop the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem could well refer to this very Chronicle:
… we send and inform the king, in order that search may be made in the book of the records of your fathers. You will find in the book of the records and learn that this city is a rebellious city, hurtful to kings and provinces, and that sedition was stirred up in it from of old. That was why this city was laid waste …
The answer confirmed that a:
… search has been made, and it has been found that this city from of old has risen against kings, and that rebellion and sedition have been made in it. And mighty kings have been over Jerusalem, who ruled over the whole province Beyond the River, to whom tribute, custom, and toll were paid.
3. Before long … There was a very considerable flurry of media interest and internet response to the Nebo-Sarsekim tablet. I myself got into hot water through trying to explain over the telephone how amazing Jursa’s discovery was in quietly proving that one named individual mentioned in the Bible who was not a king really did exist, which ended up as Curator claims Bible is true after all headline; a second blunder was describing the size of the tablet as about ‘equal to a packet of ten cigarettes’, which provoked a different kind of outcry. The tablet has been treated by the discoverer in Jursa 2008; see also Becking and Stadhouders 2009.
4. Nebuchadnezzar’s five highest-ranking officers … These very high-ranking Babylonians were in the Middle Gate at Jerusalem as the city burned and the women screamed. The Judaean chronicler was anxious to name each with his title to establish responsibility for their blasphemous deeds for posterity. The unfamiliar names and words are recorded by ear and the recorder got flustered. The Court Calendar of Nebuchadnezzar, compiled in the king’s seventh year (shortly before the first campaign), lists all high court officials by name and office. In this document (Jursa 2010: Da Riva (forthcoming)) nearly all the officials named by Jeremiah are to be found:
Nergal-Sharezer, samgar
In Babylonian he is Nergal-šar-uṣur, better known as Neriglissar, who himself twenty-six years later became king of Babylon, ruling from 560–556 BC by murdering his predecessor Amel-Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar’s son and heir (and also his own brother-in-law). The Hebrew term samgar has sometimes been understood as a place name (hence the common translation ‘of Samgar’), but it reflects the Babylonian simmāgir, ‘district governor’, which was Nergal-šar-uṣur’s title at the time according to the Court Calendar.
Nergal-Sharezer, rab mug
This title, conventionally translated ‘a high official’, also reflects a real Babylonian word, rab mungi, the commanding officer for chariots and cavalry.
These separate titles, simmāgir and rab mungi, are erroneously applied in the Hebrew text to one name, Nergal-Sharezer; we know that Nebuchadnezzar’s rab mungi at this time was called Nabu-zakir, and his name should properly have been entered here.
Nebo-Sarsekim, rab sarīs
The title conventionally translated ‘chief officer’ literally means ‘chief eunuch’, and is the Hebraised form of Babylonian rab ša-rēši, which was a high political title. As indicated above, we can identify Jeremiah’s Nebo-Sarsekim rab sarīs with the Babylonian Nabu-šarrussu-ukin, rab ša-rēši, The Judaean chronicler again transcribed the unfamiliar name for posterity as best he could.
Nebuzaradan, rab ṭabāḫīm
In Babylonian this is Nabu-zer-iddin. His title is the equivalent of Babylonian bēl or rab ṭābiḫī. This title is found in the Court Calendar but the name of the official himself is broken away in the tablet. It means literally ‘Chief Slaughterer’, but we know from other texts that the ‘slaughterers’ were the royal guard. At Jerusalem he is very clearly in charge of Nebuchadnezzar’s crack punitive war units.
The Court Calendar does mention a Nabu-zer-iddin in a different line of text, where he has the title rab nuḫatimmī, ‘Chief Cook’, with whom the Jeremiah official Nebuzaradan has sometimes been identified. This title can have nothing to do with warmongering, and the likelihood is that there were two people called Nabu-zer-iddin at the top in Babylon, rather than the ‘Chief Cook’ having been soon reappointed as ‘Commander of the Royal Guard’. The Jeremiah passages seem to be in no doubt who Nebuzaradan was and what he did; he is the only official to be named in Jeremiah 52.
Nebushazban, rab sarīs
In Babylonian the name is Nabu-šuzibanni, but here again there has been a mix-up in the text. Since we know that Nabu-šarrussu-ukin was Nebuchadnezzar’s rab sarīs, Nabu-šuzibannim must have had a different title, but he is not attested in the Court Circular and for the present we cannot identify him in a cuneiform source.
5. brief, nine-verse episode … Before the Babylon Myth and Reality exhibition opened in November 2008 we had resolved to print the text of Genesis 11:1–9 on a panel because a preliminary ‘public’ survey had suggested that a majority of individuals were either altogether unfamiliar with the story or unaware that it occurs in the Old Testament. In the flurry of interviews that attended the first few days, a journalist read over the Tower of Babel quotation on the panel among other panel texts and agreed, apparently without irony, that we had a good team of writers at our disposal.
6. run out in the early stages … The traveller in the Middle East today will commonly see inhabited houses where corner poles of scaffolding stick up high above the building as if the owner is planning on, or hoping for, another storey in due course.
7. issues of oil, barley … For this extraordinary evidence that King Jehoiachin’s party were alive and well in Babylon see Weidner 1939; Pedersén 2005a and Pedersén 2005b.
8. personal names … Here the great expertise of Ran Zadok has borne fruit; for a useful survey of this work see Millard 2013.
9. little theological text … see Pinches 1896: 1–3; Lambert 1964; Parpola 1995: 399.
10. Noah … I like especially what Berossus has to say on this point (translation after Burstein 1978: 29):
Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the deluge in happiness. He died after having lived nine hundred and fifty years. Let no one as a result of comparing life now and the fewness of the years which we live with that of the ancients think that what is said about them is false, judging that they did not live to such an age because no one now does. For they were dear to God and his own creatures; also as their food was more favourable to longer life, it is reasonable to suppose that they lived so great a number of years. Then also God permitted them to live longer because of their excellent character and the usefulness of their discoveries, astronomy and geometry, since, unless they lived six hundred years – for so long is the period of a great year – they could not have made accurate predictions.
11. the Genesis Great Ages tradition … For such literature see Hess 1994; Malamat 1994; Wilson 1994.
12. upright character and behaviour … For traditions as to Noah’s character, Lewis 1978 is interesting.
13. miraculous beginnings … The unknown-parent-for-heroes device has been applied to major historical figures in many world literatures, and the specific topic of baby exposure is often central. Evidence for this is given in Lewis 1980, where some seventy passages are collected – aside from those in Babylonian and Hebrew – that make use of this idea, written in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Indian, Persian, German, Icelandic, English, Irish, Albanian, Turkish, Chinese, Malayan and Palaung.
14. acculturated to Babylonian life … This point has been made about the Assyrians doing the same thing earlier in Parpola 1972: 34; Finkel (forthcoming [b]).
15. Great ages of man … This tablet is ME40565 in the British Museum; see Finkel 1980: 65–8. It shows the ŠÁR signs discussed on p. 308.
16. curricular tablets … A valiant study of these difficult texts, which are often in untidy beginner’s script and full o
f errors, was published in Gesche 2000.
17. This Baby Sargon tablet is ME47449 in the British Museum; see Westenholz 1997: 38–49.
18. people of the book … See Jullien and Jullien 1995.
19. crystallising into permanence … It is an interesting matter for reflection that the precarious Judaean religion which arrived out of the smoke of Jerusalem, surrounded by the mighty gods of the Egyptians and the Babylonians and all the other powers of the ancient Middle Eastern world, is the only one of them all to survive, as it has, into modern times.
20. round the country … According to Jewish tradition, certain Judaeans were settled at this time at Nehardea, a walled town at the junction with the Euphrates and the Malka River, with a synagogue built using stones and earth brought from the Temple site; this, in due course, became one major centre of Talmudic scholarship and the seat of the Exilarch.
21. their documents … An archive of more than one hundred cuneiform tablets from this crucial archive is to be published by Cornelia Wunsch and Laurie Pearce.
22. Survival of Babylonian ideas and practices … loanwords: Kwasman (forthcoming); medicine: Geller 2004; divination by dreams: Oppenheim 1956; by necromancy: Finkel 1983b; textual exegesis; Lambert 1954–6; Lieberman 1987; Cavigneaux 1987; Frahm 2011: 369–83; Finkel (forthcoming [b]).
Notes to Chapter 12: What Happened to the Ark?
1. The map in question … A recent book that covers some aspects of the Babylonian Map of the World is Horowitz 1998. Many writers who have discussed this map criticise its ‘inaccuracies’ or other supposed failings, which shows that they have never understood anything at all about it.
2. earliest known map of the world … It should be pointed out that an early crossroads-type ‘sketch map’ on a mid-third-millennium-BC tablet from the site of Fara is considered by Frans Wiggermann to be a forerunner of this map; I am unconvinced; see Wiggermann 2011: 673.
3. writing something … This duly appeared as Finkel 1995.
4. the following evening … The date of the broadcast was 1 September 1995, my forty-fourth birthday! I feel it also necessary for some reason to record that I submitted the manuscript of this book into the hands of my publisher exactly eighteen years later, on 1 September 2013.
5. written with the determinative for river … The word marratu is not the ‘real’ Babylonian word for sea; it was borrowed during the first millennium from a Chaldean dialect.
6. regions or districts … See Horowitz 1988: 27–33.
7. Very Hairy One … This type of character is known to guard important cosmic gates, and the whole family has been interestingly laid bare in Wiggermann 1992: 164–5.
8. (giant?) flightless birds … Ostriches were well known in ancient Mesopotamia; they were often depicted and their shells put to good use from as early as the third millennium BC; here the point is likely to be that while everyone knew that some so-called birds couldn’t actually fly, these Nagû III specimens were also on a giant scale, with unimaginable eggs …
9. ancient name Urartu … See Marinkovi´c 2012.
10. prefer Mount Niṣir … The argument for Nimuš over Niṣir is based on the personal name Iddin-nimuš, supposedly of a workman of north Mesopotamian origin, in which the name of the mountain functions like that of a god (Lambert 1986). We know, however, that Niṣir was locally called Kinipa, and surely that is the form which would have been used in a local name.
11. Ashurnasirpal starts … Quoted after Speiser 1928: 17–18.
12. Eutychius, Patriarch of Alexandria … Quoted after Crouse and Franz 2006: 106.
13. Gertrude Bell described … See Bell 1911.
14. Translations after Grayson 1991: 204–5.
15. On my fifth … and Like a fierce bull . . . Grayson and Novotny 2012.
16. contemporary Assyrian incantation … This tablet is in a rather idiosyncratic script and does not resemble those of Assurbanipal in the Nineveh Library; it could well come from Sennacherib’s period. It is part of an exorcistic manual against bad dreams and has not yet been published.
17. Mt Nipur … This name is not to be confused with the southern Mesopotamian city of Nippur, already mentioned.
18. murdered their father Sennacherib … On this murder and the identity of the culprits see Parpola 1980. Sennacherib was killed at Dur-Sharrukin, his father’s new palace.
19. Traditions about … Montgomery 1972 and Bailey 1989 can be recommended to anyone who is tempted to wander among these narratives.
20. an uncanny – and usually unexplained – resemblance … On the similarity issue see most recently Zaccagnini 2012.
Notes to Chapter 13: What is the Ark Tablet?
1. we find this narrative … As already mentioned, the length of the full Flood Story in Gilgamesh XI is undeniably disproportionate for the unfolding of the plot as a whole and its satisfactory dénouement. It can be seen as the device of telling a tale within a tale to keep the audience enthralled, but the length is nevertheless considerable for people who want to find out what happened in the end, and its inclusion might also mean that the redactors themselves just liked the story, and dropped it in with the minimum of alteration. Perhaps the whole of Gilgamesh XI formerly had an independent existence. We need new sources to bring new light, as always.
2. long convinced themselves … Interesting remarks on this issue are given in Cooper 1992.
3. to interest inattentive schoolboys … There is a closer parallel from the end of the first millennium BC when advanced pupils in a school at Babylon studying old and new cubit measurements were set to measure the dimensions of the giant ziggurat that could be seen from every vantage point of the city; see George 2008: 128, Fig. 109.
Notes to Appendices
1. Ancient Babylonian scholars … A full discussion of what is otherwise known about this sign and many questions to do with the eṭemmu spirit is given in Steinert 2012: 309–11.
2. Tablet I … I have translated these lines afresh, but with the benefit of many previous translations and discussions, for they have often been studied; Lambert and Millard 1969: 58–9; Foster 1993:165–6; George and Al-Rawi 1996: 149–50. The idea that Akkadian eṭemmu can mean both ‘spirit’ – as in ‘ghost’ – and ‘human spirit’, exactly like our own word, seems not to have been recognised, but it makes simple sense of this otherwise obscure passage.
3. The Descent of Ishtar … quoted after Foster 1993: 404.
4. Ur-Shanabi … For everything else that can possibly be needed concerning this name see George 2003, Vol. 1: 149–51.
5. the diameter of the Ark … one might imagine that the larger size of the Ark derives from the substitution of a larger unit in a lighterman’s song about boat building.
Bibliography
This bibliography includes all books and articles referred to or quoted in the main text and the notes.
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Anderson, W.W., Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood. [America], 2001.
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Badge, P., Coracles of the World. Llanrwst, 2009.
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Civil, M., ‘Lexicography’, in S.J. Lieberman (ed.), Sumerian Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on his Seventieth Birthday, June 7, 1974. Assyriological Studies 20. Chicago, 1975: 123–57.
Cohn, N., Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. Yale, 1996.
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