Books by Beatrice Baragli
https://brill.com/display/title/60320
Was sind die Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen? Was sind ihre beso... more https://brill.com/display/title/60320
Was sind die Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen? Was sind ihre besonderen Merkmale im Vergleich zu anderen Arten von Gebetsbeschwörungen? Unter Verwendung vieler bisher unverö fentlichter Texte bietet dieses Buch die erste vollständige philologische Edition eines Korpus der sumerischen Literatur, der in der Wissenschaft oft unterrepräsentiert ist. Das Buch untersucht diese speziell an den Sonnengott gerichtete Texttypologie und ordnet sie in die breitere Geschichte der mesopotamischen Literatur und Religion ein. Einzigartig ist, dass diese Typologie von Gebetsbeschwörungen die Bewegung der Sonne am Himmel mit der Tageszeit verbindet, zu der sie vorgetragen wurde, was uns einen seltenen Einblick in die praktische Realität der mesopotamischen religiösen Praxis gewährt.
Heidelberg: Propylaeum [https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/catalog/book/886], 2021
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verz... more Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie. Detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet unter http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. Dieses Werk ist unter der Creative Commons-Lizenz 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) veröffentlicht.
Articles by Beatrice Baragli
JAOS, 2025
Commentaries represent the best-known evidence for scholarly activities and the exegetical tradit... more Commentaries represent the best-known evidence for scholarly activities and the exegetical tradition of Mesopotamia. However, commentaries were not the only textual expressions of exegetical activity and scholarship took many different forms. The aim of this article is to elucidate the ways and purposes of the use of various hermeneutic practices other than the writing of commentaries. By analyzing mostly hemerological compilations and simultaneous bilingual compositions, a particular kind of bilingual text, this article illustrates the multiplicity of forms, functions, and scholarly strategies of exegesis and how they are deployed for different kinds or genres of texts. These alternative strategies will be compared to commentaries and their unique features and limitations will be highlighted through an analytical approach.
This article tackles the question of divine filiation in the ancient Near East, analysing the Sum... more This article tackles the question of divine filiation in the ancient Near East, analysing the Sumerian phrase dumu diĝir-ra-na “the child of his/her god.” This characteristic phrase appears almost exclusively within incantation literature and designates the patient. The article proposes that this phrase implies a specific kind of relationship between the patient and his “personal god(s)” and traces the historical development of the phrase by comparing an up-to-date collection of attestations (included as an appendix) with other phrases indicating the patient in Sumerian and Akkadian sources. The article concludes that dumu diĝir-ra-na first occurs in the Old Babylonian period and is distinct from other terms for patients in that it stresses reconciliation between the patient and the personal god as necessary for the patient’s healing. Texts that include this phrase and express the concept of reconciliation employ a rhetoric that relates a specific role to each speaker.
We present a word similarity gold standard for Akkadian, a language documented in ancient Mesopot... more We present a word similarity gold standard for Akkadian, a language documented in ancient Mesopotamian sources from the 24th century BCE until the first century CE. The gold standard comprises 300 word pairs ranked by their paradigmatic similarity by five independently working Assyriologists. We use the gold standard to tune PMI + SVD and fastText models to improve their performance. We also present a hyper-parametrized PMI + SVD model for building count-based word embeddings, that aims to deal with the data sparsity and repetition issues encountered in Akkadian texts. Our model combines Dirichlet smoothing with context distribution smoothing, and uses context similarity weighting to down-sample distortion caused by formulaic litanies and partially or fully duplicated passages.
Orientalia 92, 2023
This Article is a study of the fragmentary Sumerian tablet belonging to the National Museum of Co... more This Article is a study of the fragmentary Sumerian tablet belonging to the National Museum of Copenhagen NMC 10092. The mention of the sun god Utu and the Gate of Heroes suggest that the composition originated in Nippur
The article presents a philological edition of K.2727+K.6213, a fragmentary tablet from Nineveh t... more The article presents a philological edition of K.2727+K.6213, a fragmentary tablet from Nineveh that deals with a ritual for opening a canal. The paper discusses other references to this ritual, i.e. parallel sources for this type of ritual, the materials used, the gods addressed, and the specialists who performed the ritual actions.
This paper offers the editio princeps of an Old Babylonian Sumerian cultic song which describes a... more This paper offers the editio princeps of an Old Babylonian Sumerian cultic song which describes a previously unknown myth that features the sun god Utu in his mythical journey at sunrise, crossing the sea, his encounter with his sister Inana, and the merchant trade of luxury goods. The myth featuring Utu encountering his sister Inana at the eastern horizon was otherwise attested only in scattered texts, like Utu F. This composition offers also a rare literary description of the far-flung trade of precious metal, stone, and above all aromatics that went through the trading hub of Sippar. This resembles Utu's role as the city god of Sippar, as patron of travelling merchants and also as protector of the weak.
Short proceedings of the fourth meeting of the Giovani Ricercatori Italiani di Storia e Filologia... more Short proceedings of the fourth meeting of the Giovani Ricercatori Italiani di Storia e Filologia del Vicino Oriente Antico (GRISeF-VOA) – Ricerche in corso (December 2nd 2022, online)
https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/57007
The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, t... more The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, the Fragmentarium has now reached the size of 21,200 cuneiform tablets, totalling over 300,000 lines of text. Secondly, the Corpus has been greatly enlarged with editions of several texts, such as the Hymn to Ninurta as Savior, the Great Prayer to Nabû, and particularly the Epic of Gilgameš. Thirdly, a sophisticated string-alignment algorithm, based on the python-alignment library, has been fine-tuned for cuneiform script and implemented. The algorithm has been run several times, and has found several matchings that had escaped the attention of humans, such as a new fragment of the latest datable manuscript of Gilgameš edited in no. 27, text no. 2. The growth of the manuscript base of texts is important in its own right, but it also has a larger significance for the understanding of Mesopotamian literature, since it contributes decisively to its contextualization. The importance of recovering the context in a tradition in which the authors of most texts are still unknown, and indeed in which the date of composition of almost all works of literature is impossible to establish, can hardly be overstated. In this respect, the pièce de résistance of this collection is constituted by T. Mitto's new edition of the Catalogue of Texts and Authors (no. 26). The edition is informed by several new fragments and includes two pieces of a hitherto unsuspected 190 Enrique Jiménez et al. 35. BM 38873: A Parallel Fragment to Kiutu M, Beatrice Baragli 76 and Daisuke Shibata BM 38873 is a small fragment written in Neo-Babylonian script that belongs to the Babylon Collection of the British Museum. Its text was described by Leichty-Finkel-Walker (2019, 405) as a "bilingual incantation". Its obverse preserves eight lines of a bilingual text, while its reverse contains the remains of a colophon. T. Mitto identified the fragment as a close parallel to a manuscript of Kiutu M from Nineveh (Baragli 2022, 367-372). The preserved sections are almost identical with Kiutu M 3-6, although obv. 2'-5' of its text slightly differs from it. However, obv. 2'-5' of the fragment also partially parallel TCL 6 53 obv. 5-6, a prayer to Anu from Hellenistic Uruk, which was composed using materials from various older prayers and shares at least its opening section with Kiutu M. 77 The phrases in obv. 6'-9' of this fragment are, however, missing from this prayer to Anu. As indicated by these parallels, the prayer in BM 38873 is either a variant of the Nineveh version of Kiutu M or another Sumerian prayer belonging to the corpus of the "healer" (āšipūtu) that has certain lines in common with Kiutu M. Due to the fragmentary state of the tablet, a final decision must be postponed until further pieces are discovered. Until now, only one manuscript of Kiutu M has been found in the Kuyunjik collection. Kiutu M has been suggested to be the Kiutu of the first "house" of the Bīt rimki ritual; however, the available information is insufficient for such an assumption (Baragli 2022, 368-369). If BM 38873 is another manuscript of Kiutu M, this would attest the presence of this Kiutu also in southern Mesopotamia. Transliteration 76. B. Baragli's contribution was written with the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The authors are grateful to K. Simkó for collating individual signs of the tablet. 77. D. Shibata is preparing a new edition and study of TCL 6 53, to be published in a volume edited by B. Baragli and U. Gabbay.
The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, t... more The Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) team has achieved several milestones in 2022. First, the Fragmentarium has now reached the size of 21,200 cuneiform tablets, totalling over 300,000 lines of text. Secondly, the Corpus has been greatly enlarged with editions of several texts, such as the Hymn to Ninurta as Savior, the Great Prayer to Nabû, and particularly the Epic of Gilgameš. Thirdly, a sophisticated string-alignment algorithm, based on the python-alignment library, has been fine-tuned for cuneiform script and implemented. The algorithm has been run several times, and has found several matchings that had escaped the attention of humans, such as a new fragment of the latest datable manuscript of Gilgameš edited in no. 27, text no. 2. The growth of the manuscript base of texts is important in its own right, but it also has a larger significance for the understanding of Mesopotamian literature, since it contributes decisively to its contextualization. The importance of recovering the context in a tradition in which the authors of most texts are still unknown, and indeed in which the date of composition of almost all works of literature is impossible to establish, can hardly be overstated. In this respect, the pièce de résistance of this collection is constituted by T. Mitto's new edition of the Catalogue of Texts and Authors (no. 26). The edition is informed by several new fragments and includes two pieces of a hitherto unsuspected 106 Enrique Jiménez et al. Babylonian version of it, which shows that the Catalogue, or a composition akin to it, circulated in Babylonia in the last few centuries before the turn of the eras. Even more important for the recovery of the context of Babylonian literature are the newly established identifications of several of the incipits given in the Catalogue: the progress made since the last critical edition of the text (Lambert 1962) is considerable. New authors can now be recovered from oblivion, and their oeuvre studied in some detail. Three compositions, all of them identifiable, can now be credited to the scholar Rīmūt-Gula (Mitto, no. 25), a fact that allows us, perhaps for the first time, to study the style of a Babylonian author across several of his works. The new sections of the Catalogue, together with several new textual discoveries, afford us a context also for the Great Hymn to Ištar: it was probably authored, according to the Babylonian tradition, by the elusive scholar Aba-Ninnu-dari (Jiménez-Rozzi, no. 32), homonymous or perhaps identical with the scholar called AΒiqar in the Uruk List of Kings and Sages. New readings of old manuscripts also provide evidence for a possible serialization of Bullussa-rabi's Hymn to Gula in first-millennium Babylonia (Földi, no. 31). *** More fragments are identified almost daily, so inevitably some of the notes edited in previous instalments of this series need be supplemented. A. Hätinen adds several new fragments of Ludlul (no. 28) to the already published ones in Hätinen 2020 and in the introduction to the third instalment. G. Rozzi edits additional fragments of the Great Šamaš Hymn (no. 29), to be added to those that appeared in the preceding collection (Rozzi 2021b). Zs. J. Földi furthers the textual basis of Bullussarabi's Gula Hymn (no. 30), thus continuing the labor started in Földi 2019b. *** From the Electronic Babylonian Literature Lab 25-35 185 34. Further Kiutu Fragments and Joins, Beatrice Baragli 75 The Kiutu incantation-prayers addressed to Utu are a group of Sumerian texts that describe the movement of the sun in the sky or of a cultic divine statue on earth. The eBL team, in particular Zs. J. Földi, has identified some new fragments during the final revision phase of the main edition of this corpus (Baragli 2022); however due to time constraints they could not be included in it (see the Addenda, ibid. 642). They are therefore edited here. 1) The new join K.17907+ (Kiutu br 6) The small fragment K.17907 joins K.5680+, a manuscript of the Kiutu of the sixth "house" of the Bīt rimki ritual (Nin5 in Baragli 2022, 511). The present fragment contains the remains of 4 lines, whose endings none of the known manuscripts fully preserve. Transliteration Kiutu br 6 49a (Nin5 r. 11). [ka-sili]m {šà} ~úl-la [...] Kiutu br 6 50a (Nin5 r. 12). [enim-ĝar sa6-g]a [...] Kiutu br 6 51a (Nin5 r. 13). [ d utu lugal dum]u diĝir-ra-na ! šu-a ~é-en-d[a-ab-...] Kiutu br 6 52a (Nin5 r. 14). [en ki-gal kul-aba4]{ ki?-ke4 ? } {saĝ ?-ni ?-x} {kù ?-ga ? } [...] Translation Kiutu br 6 49a. [in the peac]e of the joy of the heart [...] Kiutu br 6 50a. in [the good utterance] [...] Kiutu br 6 51a. [Utu], may [the king, so]n of his god, be sa[ved ...] Kiutu br 6 52a. [Lord, pedestal] of [Kulaba], steadfastly, the holy [...] Notes 51. This verb is probably to be restored as a form of šu(-ĝar) ge4, cf. Unb3: šu-a; Nin1: šu-ĝar (previously read as níĝ), probably meant as a possible restoration due to the occurrence of magāri in the Akkadian line (suggestion courtesy T. Mitto). 75. The contribution was written with the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This paper analyses Sumerian (Emegir) compositions (mainly hymns) addressed to the sun god from t... more This paper analyses Sumerian (Emegir) compositions (mainly hymns) addressed to the sun god from the Old Babylonian period on the basis of the rhetorical device of repetition and the deities depicted (in addition to Utu). Such an inhomogeneous corpus includes texts from Larsa, Sippar, Ur, Meturan, and Nippur. The aim is to trace the origin of such compositions based on internal literary features, even when the archaeological context is missing.
Published in: B. Baragli, A. Dietz, Zs. J. Földi, P. Heindl, P. Lohmann and S. P. Schlüter (eds.), Distant Worlds and Beyond. Special Issue Dedicated to the Graduate School Distant Worlds (2012‒2021), Distant Worlds Journal Special Issue 3, Heidelberg, Propylaeum 2021, 15–23
The work and thinking of Mircea Eliade represent a fundamental turning point in modern history of... more The work and thinking of Mircea Eliade represent a fundamental turning point in modern history of religion. His work on the concept of the sacred was strongly innovative. However, the reception of Eliade's philosophy was and is still today strongly criticised for many reasons, one of them is the accuracy of his method. The present work does not aim to "rehabilitate" the past work of the philosopher as to reevaluate it in the light of Assyriology and analyse his reception in the field. The main question is whether his approach might be closer to ancient thinking than the one of other modern theories.
Conferences, workshops, and seminars by Beatrice Baragli
https://ritualsinmesopotamia.com
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Books by Beatrice Baragli
Was sind die Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen? Was sind ihre besonderen Merkmale im Vergleich zu anderen Arten von Gebetsbeschwörungen? Unter Verwendung vieler bisher unverö fentlichter Texte bietet dieses Buch die erste vollständige philologische Edition eines Korpus der sumerischen Literatur, der in der Wissenschaft oft unterrepräsentiert ist. Das Buch untersucht diese speziell an den Sonnengott gerichtete Texttypologie und ordnet sie in die breitere Geschichte der mesopotamischen Literatur und Religion ein. Einzigartig ist, dass diese Typologie von Gebetsbeschwörungen die Bewegung der Sonne am Himmel mit der Tageszeit verbindet, zu der sie vorgetragen wurde, was uns einen seltenen Einblick in die praktische Realität der mesopotamischen religiösen Praxis gewährt.
Articles by Beatrice Baragli
Conferences, workshops, and seminars by Beatrice Baragli
Was sind die Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen? Was sind ihre besonderen Merkmale im Vergleich zu anderen Arten von Gebetsbeschwörungen? Unter Verwendung vieler bisher unverö fentlichter Texte bietet dieses Buch die erste vollständige philologische Edition eines Korpus der sumerischen Literatur, der in der Wissenschaft oft unterrepräsentiert ist. Das Buch untersucht diese speziell an den Sonnengott gerichtete Texttypologie und ordnet sie in die breitere Geschichte der mesopotamischen Literatur und Religion ein. Einzigartig ist, dass diese Typologie von Gebetsbeschwörungen die Bewegung der Sonne am Himmel mit der Tageszeit verbindet, zu der sie vorgetragen wurde, was uns einen seltenen Einblick in die praktische Realität der mesopotamischen religiösen Praxis gewährt.