Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Because of the symbolic and religious importance of cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia, these images were targeted on numerous occasions by invading forces as part of the conquest of a foreign polity. In the case of the Assyrians, triumphant kings would sometimes list cult statues from a newlyconquered city or group as spoils of war, alongside members of the royal family, their subjects, and their precious goods. Such acts of divine deportation are sometimes called "godnapping" in secondary literature. A conspicuous feature in godnapping reports is the paucity of divine names mentioned. Deported cult images are instead simply called "gods" of a foreign king, people, or city. Because godnapping has thus far been studied purely as a political tactic, the omission of names has been ascribed to the Assyrians' disinterest in or ignorance of non-Assyrian divinities. This study proposes viewing godnapping not through a political lens but rather a religious one, arguing that the Assyrians would certainly have been aware of which cult statues they were deporting, and that they would have considered the non-Assyrian cult images gods in their own right. Focusing upon the religious and inscriptional traditions of the Assyrians, this paper seeks to demonstrate that omitting divine names in deportation accounts may have been purposeful and meant to prevent these gods from seeking retribution. Instead of using the traditional approach of examining the political ramifications for the conquered polity whose gods have been deported, this paper turns instead to the religious and psychological consequences for those who were deporting the gods and exposes the Assyrian perspective of godnapping as presented in their own inscriptions.

When Esarhaddon named his successors, he split the empire between two of his sons, with Assurbanipal as king of Assyria and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn as king of Babylonia. This arrangement functioned until 652 BCE, at which point a civil war began between the brothers. The war ended with Assurbanipal's victory and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's death in 648 BCE. While Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's death is mentioned in several of Assurbanipal's inscriptions, it is still unclear how the king of Babylon met his end, and scholars have suggested theories ranging from suicide, assassination, execution, and accidental death. By offering a reexamination of the evidence for royal death in general and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's demise in particular, this article explores how possibly taboo topics such as fratricide, regicide, and suicide were depicted in Neo-Assyrian state texts and how Assurbanipal appears to have coped with his brother's rebellion and death, especially as compared to Assyrian treatments of belligerent and rebellious foreign kings. This article argues that the relative silence around Šamaššumaukīn's death is due to the fact that, while he was an enemy combatant, he was nonetheless a member of the Assyrian royal family and a legitimately-installed king. Overall, this article concludes that Assurbanipal uses several rhetorical strategies to distance himself from Šamaš-šuma-ukīn, especially invoking deus ex machina as a way to avoid even the potential accusation of fratricide and ultimately erasing his brother from the written record and Assyrian history.

Šamaš-šuma-ukīn is a unique case in the Neo-Assyrian Empire: he was a member of the Assyrian royal family who was installed as king of Babylonia but never of Assyria. Previous Assyrian rulers who had control over Babylonia were recognized as kings of both polities, but Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's father, Esarhaddon, had decided to split the empire between two of his sons, giving Ashurbanipal kingship over Assyria and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn the throne of Babylonia. As a result, Šamaš-šuma-ukīn is an intriguing case-study for how political, familial, and cultural identities were constructed in texts and interacted with each other as part of royal self-presentation. This paper shows that, despite Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's familial and cultural identity as an Assyrian, he presents himself as a quintessentially Babylonian king to a greater extent than any of his predecessors. To do so successfully, Šamaš-šuma-ukīn uses Babylonian motifs and titles while ignoring the Assyrian tropes his brother Ashurbanipal retains even in his Babylonian royal inscriptions.

Despite a relative dearth of information in the surviving corpus about Assyrian priests' more routine concerns, the Assyrian state correspondence contains some details that can improve our knowledge of priests' daily lives, rights, and responsibilities. Using four case studies, this paper analyzes situations in which priests are accused of misconduct or crimes to better understand the powers and expectations of individual priestly offices as well as the realities of everyday life that might have rendered these boundaries more flexible or surmountable. These cases of irregularities reveal that cul-tic personnel had distinct economic, legal, and judicial roles and were sometimes able to extend their powers when necessary to manage issues such as crime and shortages in resources, only requesting royal intervention as a last resort.

This paper presents a study of YOS 17, 360, a collection of 30-33 administrative records from the Eanna temple in Uruk that are dated to Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur (Nebuchadnezzar) II's 14th year. The first few columns contain transactions concerning gold, while the rest are largely related to prebendary payments. In addition to providing an edition of YOS 17, 360 and related texts, this study seeks to understand why these particular transactions were collected and what insight it gives us into the historical circumstances. The evidence suggests that Eanna experienced a financial crisis at this time, during which it sold off its assets and had difficulties paying its priests. The cause of the crisis seems to have been royal demands put on the temple to provide money and manpower in support of the king's building and/or military endeavors, possibly including Babylonian movements into the Levant and resulting clashes with Egypt.

Heterarchy theory is a valuable tool for analyzing complex and changing relationships between elements in a system. It has been employed in anthropology, archaeology, and recently in religious studies. Its utility has not yet been exploited for religions that are studied through textual evidence, such as Mesopotamian religions. As Mesopotamian religions were polytheistic and the texts represent multiple genres from a broad timeframe, relationships between system actors such as gods, temples, and cities defy static and lineal arrangements. Heterarchies are well suited for untangling these relationships, showing how they change depending on the measuring criteria. Using the case of the city of Assur, which housed many deities and was both the religious center and a political capital, heterarchy theory shows how the same elements-temples and cities-reveal different rankings that coexisted simultaneously. Heterarchies productively complicate our understanding of these religious relationships and expose the multimodality of each element in the system.

Qarpatalli, Hadad of the Vineyards, Nikaruwas, and Kubaba. In Neirab, the moon-god S´ahr, the sun-god Sˇamasˇ, the moon-goddess Nikkal, and the fire-god Nusku are attested (KAI 225-26). In Hamath and Lu asˇ, the cults of Iluwer, Baalsˇamain, S´ahr, and Sˇamasˇare documented (KAI 202). The pantheon of Damascus must have comprised more deities than the main gods Hadad and Ramman, but only Atargatis, Adonis, Barada, and Theandrios are known by name. The local pantheon of Tell Deir Alla in the southern Damascus region comprised El, Sˇamasˇ, Sˇagar, and Asˇtar. The panthea of the Transjordanian kingdoms of the Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites were very restricted in the number of their members. As in the case of Phoenicia, no mythology presently exists, so that nothing is known about the interactions among individual deities. The supreme god of the Ammonite pantheon was Milkom (

According to Neo-Assyrian royal ideology, the king had essentially two main duties: to conquer the lands around him and to use those conquests to enrich his core territories. 1 This dual nature of the king as destroyer and provider was not contradictory; in fact, they were two sides of the same coin of divine imperative. In the royal inscriptions, which chronicled the king's deeds, it was the gods who managed every facet of the empire: they selected the king, they directed his campaigns, they assisted him on the battlefield and they ensured his triumphs. 2 In return, the gods were portrayed as the primary recipients of the bounties of successful warfare when the kings used the spoils to build or renovate temples and provide offerings in gratitude. 3 Conquered provinces were moreover required to contribute taxes and tributes directly to the temple of Aššur, the highest god of Assyria, whose name was synonymous with the empire itself. 4 But this did not translate into forcing subjects to worship Aššur; actually, worshipping Aššur outside of his eponymous patron city of Assur was strongly discouraged, and conquered peoples were not required to give up their local cults either.