Isin-Larsa Period

In this review article, the 221 Old Babylonian letters published by Andrew George (2018) in CUSAS 36 are discussed. They stem mostly from southern Iraq covering a period of time between ca. 1880 and 1712 BCE. The most interesting group is the Sumu-El correspondence dated between ca. 1870 and 1865 BCE of which the historical and broader geo-political context during the Isin-Larsa wars is explored. As the provenance of these letters Raḫābum is proposed, an as of yet still not located town in the Larsa kingdom. For the other letters, not belonging to the Sumu-El group, efforts are made to group them together and link them to other text groups such as the Ipqu-Sîn dossier. In addition, it is proposed that a group of letters form a coherent dossier revolving around the Rīm-Sîn (1822-1773 BCE) era military officer Lipit-Ištar. The article ends with additional comments on selected letters, proposing different readings, notes, and additional bibliographical references.

Ana kullanım amacı ürünlerin bir yerden bir yere nakli sırasında
güvenliği, bir odanın veya odanın içerisindeki ürünlerin korunması
olsa da farklı kullanım amaçları da bulunan mühürler,
gerek üzerindeki betimlemeler ve gerekse işlendikleri maddeler
ile özellikle tarihöncesinin sanat anlayışı ile oluşturulmuştur.
Arkeoloji literatüründe yayınlanmış ve bilimsel değerlendirmeye
tabi tutulmuş mühürlerin büyük bir kısmı koleksiyonlarda
yer alan eserlere aittir. Ülkemizde bugüne kadar çeşitli
koleksiyonerlere ait eserler yayınlanmış olsa da mühürler
hakkında herhangi bir yayın bulunmamaktadır. Elinizdeki bu
çalışma içerisinde günümüzden 8000 yıl öncesinden 1500 yıl
öncesine kadar olan zaman dilimine ait damga, silindir ve kompozit
mühürler yer almaktadır. Bu bağlamda Ülkemiz için bir
ilk olma özelliğine de sahip olan elinizdeki çalışma entelektüel
okuyucuya söz konusu mühürler ve ait oldukları dönemlerle
ilgili genel resmi sunmayı amaçlarken koleksiyonda yer alan
mühürlerin bilim dünyasına tanıtılmasını da hedeflemektedir.

ABSTRACT: This lecture focuses mainly upon Mesopotamia and Syria during the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2,000 - 1,550 BCE), which translate into the Isin-Larsa period to Old Babylonian period. The lecture begins with a brief overview on the emergence of the Middle Bronze Age in this region, and the main sources for assessing the Middle Bronze Age. It proceeds to the Isin-Larsa period, looking at the kingdom of Isin, the kingdom of Larsa, and selected other City states during the Isin-Larsa period (ca. 2017–1763 BC) in southern Mesopotamia. The lecture shifts north to examine the kingdom of Eshnunna, the kingdom of Ashur (including a brief introduction to the Old Assyrian trade with Anatolia [covered more extensively in the next lecture]), and the kingdom of Mari. This section is concluded by an overview of trade and influence between the Near East and Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha during the MB Age.  The lecture then moves to the advent of Hammurabi's reign and the Old Babylonian Empire. This section also looks at later rulers, including Samsu-iluna (ca. 1749 - 1712 BC), Ammisaduqa (ca. 1646 – 1626 BC), and Samsuditana (ca. 1625 – 1595 BC).  The lecture ends with a brief look at the transition from the Middle Bronze Age to Late Bronze Age. ADDED NOTE: Slight revision with trade section and two added slides. UPDATED: 2022 Spring offering.

(Please contact me if you require an offprint of this paper.)

In the second third of the 19th century BC, the kingdom of Larsa in southern Mesopotamia went through a politically tumultuous phase. During this period, an individual with a complex identity emerges: Kudur-Mabuk, a man of Elamite origin, whose political career can be traced back to the reign of Sin-iddinam (1849-1843 BC), when he was stationed at Maškan-šapir in Emutbal. Only a decade later, he would witness his sons Warad-Sin (1834-1823 BC) and later Rim-Sin (1822-1763 BC) becoming kings. Kudur-Mabuk appears as a powerful figure in the kingdom of Larsa, without having been king himself. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the political identity of this ruler without a crown.

A myriad of cuneiform texts indicate that Dilmun was one of Mesopotamia’s principal Bronze Age trading partners. In this contribution an alternative explanation will be proposed on how and when it seized control over the maritime Gulf trade at the beginning of the second millennium BC. Dilmun’s route to dominance is captured in three steps, all closely linked to key changes in its social formation process. Evidence suggests that after a formative phase, during which Bahrain was colonized and eventually became Dilmun’s core area, it took two to three generations for Dilmun to establish full control over the waters of the Lower Sea, thereby not only generating a lot of wealth but also transforming this polity into a regional superpower.

Keywords: Dilmun, Bahrain, Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf, maritime trade, Bronze Age


!!!!!!!!!! I DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FINAL PRINTING PROCESS BUT I AM NOT HAPPY WITH THE QUALITY OF FIGS. 1-4. HIGH QUALITY RESOLUTION FIGS 1-4 ARE UPLOADED IN A SEPARATE FILE !!!!!!!!!!

Počiatky starovekého orientálneho mesta Babylon, ktorého panovníci založili rovnomennú ríšu, časovo nadväzujú na vytratenie sa Sumerov z chodu dejín. Nepomohla im ani súdobá vyspelá kultúra, remeselná výroba, písomníctvo, veď popri Egypťanoch ich pokladáme za zakladateľov ľudskej civilizácie. Všetko sa začalo najmä na prelome 3. a 2. tisícročia pred n. l. v južnej Mezopotámii.

"Recent studies of the faunal remains from the Danish excavations at Qal'at al-Bahrain show that a substantial portion of the Early Dilmun material consisted of sea turtles. So far two species have been identified in Early Dilmun contexts, the Green turtle (Chelonia mydas) and the Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata). Sea turtle remains, together with those of fish which inhabit depths only present in the interior of the Gulf, show a siginficant increase in the late City I period, suggesting that teams of Early Dilmun fishermen, possibly working together, exploited far away fisheries.

Turtles were probably exploited for their meat, fat, eggs and keratinous scutes. It is possible that they were also hunted for sport. The most efficient method to capture sea turtles is to catch females when they come up to the nesting beaches to lay their eggs, but they can also fairly easily be subdued at sea. Fishermen spearing sea turtles are portrayed on a number of Early Dilmun stamp seals.

Early second millennium texts of the alik Tilmun (i.e. commercial Dilmun-traders) from the Babylonian 'coastal' site of Ur show that there was a sizeable trade in turtle shells and paraphernalia from Dilmun into Babylonia, despite the fact that substantial numbers of turtles were listed regularly among the yields of Babylonian fishermen. This may be because only sea turtles produce workable keratinous scutes, and their natural distribution seems to have been beyond the normal fishing grounds exploited by Babylonian fishermen."

An edition of a royal hymn to king Gungunum of Larsa celebrating his victory over the Didnu tribes. The text is philologically and historically discussed, showing it is a later copy of a now lost original.  The royal ideology behind the hymn - so it is claimed - is a re-enactment of the fall of Ur (only now, with a happy end).

In addition to the small group of well-known Old Babylonian incantations dealing with diseases that have fallen from the sky, there is now a complete new manuscript dated from the 19th century BC and most probably originating from the kingdom of Larsa. This is the oldest known version. Its particularities are the subject of a short analysis.

The construction of cities, their monumental structures and ceremonial spaces, and their cultural life occupy considerable space in the early literary compositions from southern Mesopotamia. The scholarship on Mesopotamian cities has been limited to questions of the emergence of urbanism and social complexity, state formation, labor organization, craft specialization, population estimates and settlement hierarchies during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. This paper contributes to these debates through the discussion of a series of concepts concerning the city and urban life drawn from the early Mesopotamian corpus of poetry in Sumerian, with special emphasis on the so-called “city laments.”  This is, on the one hand, an attempt to bridge the gap between the archaeological accounts of early cities in the ancient Near East and the literary representations of urban space. On the other hand, the goal is to move towards understanding the poetics of urban space in Mesopotamia, to read cities as places of human experience, everyday practice, political discourse, and cultural imagination. The paper focuses on two frequently encountered metaphors concerning the city in early Mesopotamian poetry: the cattle pen and the sheepfold (Sum. tur and amaš), which takes us to the Mesopotamian conceptualization of the king as shepherd and the society as his flock. I suggest that early Mesopotamian economy and political structure presents us a fascinating case of what Michel Foucault has termed “pastoral power”. Considering Foucault’s notion of the “pastoral power” as a technology of governance and royal rhetoric, I discuss the cattle pen and sheepfold as spatial metaphors that define the Mesopotamian city between movement and settlement, between economies of pasturage and agriculture. Here, the city appears as a site where the king’s ideals of beneficence and pastoral power finds expression, while royal power is characterized not so much as governance over a territory but over a “multiplicity” (the “flock”). This rhetoric of power based itself on a regime of beneficence and care, rather than on violence and terror.

07.04.2021, 12th ICAANE, Workshop 1: Ceramic Traditions and Cultural Territories: New Research Approaches in the Study of the South Mesopotamia Pottery

The excavations on the southern mound of Ur conducted by Prof. Dr. Adelheid Otto (LMU), a part of the renewed Ur Excavations under the direction of Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Stone (Stony Brook, NY), in 2017 and 2019 unearthed a house of the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian period with remains of the inventory in precisely datable contexts. This presents the opportunity to analyze the pottery in a clear context and to establish a typology of early Old Babylonian pottery in Southern Mesopotamia. The Ur III level lies immediately beneath the house. This offers the rare chance to study Ur III pottery in well stratified contexts and compare them with the Old Babylonian assemblage. The material of both levels can be dated with the help of tablets and sealings. I will present the first results of the pottery analysis of the German excavation at Ur with the aim to produce a clearer understanding of the differences and continuities of southern Mesopotamian pottery from the end of the 3rd to the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Aj v roku 2017 v južnej Mezopotámii prebiehal jeden z najvýznamnejších výskumov v dejinách slovenskej archeológie. Ide o Projekt SAHI – Tell Jokha. Skúma dôležitú starovekú lokalitu, na ktorej podľa vedcov v 3. tisícročí pred n. l. dominovalo sumerské osídlenie.

Archaeological investigations of the largest urban centers in southern Mesopotamia have excluded collection and detailed interpretation of faunal remains. This exclusion has resulted in a biased interpretation of urban dynamics based largely on architecture, site planning, artifact distribution, and textual evidence. The samples that do exist from these sites are often incomplete. Additionally, textual evidence pertaining to animal exploitation is essentially silent when it comes to pig husbandry and offers little information on the exploitation of fish and other wild resources. While addressing these biases with the analysis of faunal material from the late second millennium (BCE) urban site of Mashkan-shapir, this study also aims to shed light on the complex interplay between urban life and the natural diversity of the southern Mesopotamian wetlands. The site is presented as a model for heterarchical sociopolitical organization and sustainable agroecological approach to subsistence. A fundamental link is made between sustainability and heterarchical organization and consensus.

Results of the analysis of over 7000 specimens from excavation, as well as nearly 2900 specimens from systematic flotation, indicate that wetland resources were an integral part of the site economy. The data suggest pigs were a major dietary component, and suggest low intensity cultivation of free roaming "street pigs" as the likely pig rearing strategy. Ovicaprid remains indicate a strong bias towards sheep with the primary goal of wool production. The study attempts to describe and quantify the role of wetlands as a sustainable resource adding to the vitality and success of Mashkan-shapir. The data suggest an urban setting intimately linked to wetland ecosystems. This model of wetland exploitation is compared to both ancient and modern data including modern models of mixed species sustainable agroecosystems to illustrate the efficiency and sustainability of the proposed Mashkan-shapir model. The data from Mashkan-shapir suggest that a heretofore unexamined or hidden portion of the economy based on fishing, hunting, household level pig husbandry, and wetland resource exploitation, played a crucial role in the lives of Mesopotamian urbanites.

This paper provides an overview of the archaeological data concerning the transition from Early Bronze Age to Middle Bronze Age in the Upper Khabur valley, in the Syrian Jezirah.
The long sequence of occupation exposed in area G at Tell Barri, Old Babylonian Kahat, allows us to appreciate the development of ceramic production from the perspective of the longue durée, and to evaluate the repertory dating to the phase of de-urbanization in Jezirah at the very end of the 3rd millennium BC. Additional evidence comes from recent investigations in area Q, where the southern periphery of the late 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC settlement has been brought to light, providing us with a new set of ceramics reminiscent of southern Mesopotamian Ur III and Isin-Larsa types. The upper layers of Khabur ware period testify of the urban growth of Middle Bronze Age Kahat

The post-IIc period, a transitional phase between the “Golden Age” of the City IIb-c period and the annexation of Dilmun by foreign powers during City IIIa, is still poorly understood. Examination of City «IIF» pottery from Excavation 420 at Qalʿat al-Bahrayn by the present author corroborates original observations about the composition of the indigenous assemblage but refutes claims about the absence of funerary and Babylonian pottery. The latter are particularly important as they provide a clear link between settlement and funerary assemblages as well as the Babylonian chronology. By combining a wide range of archaeological and textual information from the northern part of the Gulf, Mesopotamia and Elam it becomes clear that our overall perception of Dilmun during the post-IIc period needs to be revised. The available chronological evidence, though still tenuous, is characterized by a strong internal cohesion, which eventually may help resolve one of the most intriguing remaining challenges of Near Eastern archaeology: the Old to Middle Babylonian transition.

Keywords: Qal’at al-Bahrain (Qala’at al-Bahrain / Qalʿat al-Bahrayn / Raʾs al-Qalʿah), Dilmun, Bahrain, Early Dilmun period, 2nd millennium chronology (Middle, Low and Ultra-Low Chronologies).

In 2018, A. R. George published a transliteration and translation of a large group of cuneiform letters,  including  more  than  30  letters  written  in  the  name  of  king  of  Larsa  Sumuel  (1894–1866 BC) and his entourage. Letters were written at the very end of the reign of king Sumuel, when the long-standing rivalry between Larsa and its northern neighbor Isin intensified. King of Isin Erra-imitti, apparently tried to cut off Larsa from direct control over the water resourc-es  of  the  Euphrates,  and  his  soldiers  made  constant  raids  on  the  border  territories  of  Larsa.  Sumuel in his letters exchanges information with the senior officers about the movement of the enemy, gives orders for the deployment of military units, for urgent construction of defen-sive structures, supplying military garrisons with grain, reconstruction of city walls damaged during  enemy  raids  etc.  When  making  decisions  of  a  military  and  strategic  nature,  Sumuel,  like other rulers of that time, tried to follow the will of the gods, the reflection of which could be “read” on the liver of the sacrificial animal. Documents published by A. George represent a  valuable addition to a very meager collection of cuneiform sources from Larsa in the mid — 19th century BC. Their study makes it possible to trace the methods of government and war-fare used by king Sumuel, and sheds new light on the dramatic events that ended the reign of this king.