Ashmolean Museum: 18 (2023-06-24)

Created by: Wagensonner, Klaus

Expository text on the cultic calendar; Ashmolean Museum, Ashm 1924-789.

The cultic calendar was of immense importance in Mesopotamia. This tablet in the Ashmolean Museum is a type of composition that was known to the ancient scribes as kakku sakku, "sealed, stopped up". A. Livingstone describes such texts as "expository works in which events from rituals are detailed and then explained by equating them with mythological events" (Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works [1986], 115). As was noted by O. R. Gurney in his edition of the text in OECT 11, the only close parallel to the text in the Ashmolean Museum is VAT 9947 (see Livingstone 1986, 126ff.). Other compositions that loosely relate to such a text are the series Iqqur ippuš or the so-called Astrolabes (see, for instance, Astrolabe B). Most information regarding our text can be gained from the first column, which is better preserved. This column deals with days of the second month in the Babylonian calendar (iti-gu4, Ayyaru). Astrolabe B relates to the gu4-si-su festival in Nippur, which preceded the preparations of the coming plowing and sowing. That text states: "The month Ayyaru, the Pleiades, the Seven Gods. The Opening up of the ground; the oxen are yoked, the land becomes arable. The plows are washed; the month of heroic Ningirsu, the great ensi of Enlil." The tablet in the Ashmolean Museum deals with rituals performed on various days during specific months. Edition: Gurney, O. R. 1989. Literary and miscellaneous texts in the Ashmolean Museum. OECT 11, Oxford, pp. 26ff. CDLI entry: P348949

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus