Later in the project, we will make quantitative analyses of the manuscripts' linguistic and orthographic features to look for small-scale and large-scale geographical and diachronic change. the library of Rēš, temple of the great sky god Anu-Zeus in Uruk, c.200 BCE (van Dijk and Mayer, Baghdader Mitteilungen, Beiheft 10 and related, informally excavated tablets).the library from a private house from area Ue 18 in Uruk, owned by two separate families of āšipu scholars, c.450-300 BCE (Hunger, von Weiher, Spätbabylonische Texte aus Uruk, 1-5 ).the library found outside a priestly family house in Sultantepe/Huzirina near Harran, at the edge of the Neo-Assyrian empire (Gurney and Finkelstein, Gurney and Hulin, Sultantepe Tablets, 1-2 ), destroyed, like the temple library, in c.612 BCE.the Neo-Assyrian temple library of Nabû in the royal city of Nimrud/Kalhu in northern Iraq (Wiseman and Black, Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud, 4 ).To that end we are undertaking a comparative study of four scholarly libraries for which adequate archaeological data exist: This project aims to restore context and coherence to that scholarship by studying it holistically. Previous analyses have often decontextualised and fragmented Assyro-Babylonian scholarship into modern disciplinary categories such as 'science', 'magic', and 'religion'. While many hundreds of individual scholarly works have been edited and published from cuneiform libraries, there have been almost no in-depth studies of the libraries in their entirety. A diachronic analysis of four scholarly libraries Temples were the last bastions of cuneiform scholarship until at least the final centuries BCE. New genres came into being others were adapted or survived relatively unchanged still others disappeared completely. The courts of Iranian (c.540-330 BCE c.130 BCE onwards) and Greek (c.330-130 BCE) rulers no longer supported cuneiform scholarly traditions. Here scholarship was adapted to new purposes of maintaining the intellectual integrity and social status of native religion in the face of new ways of thinking and believing. The scholars in turn depended on large libraries holding a wide range of scholarly works written on cuneiform tablets, from astronomy to mythology, kept both in private households and in institutions such as temples and palaces.Īfter Assyria fell in 612 BCE, Babylonian scholarly activity continued to flourish and develop under the patronage of wealthy urban temples in the south. A retinue of scholarly advisors guided royal decision-making through the observation and analysis of omens, and the performance of appropriate rituals. But Assyrian kingship depended not solely on piety and military might. The ideology of empire centred on the symbiotic relationship between the king and the great god Aššur: military conquest was both an act of devotion and confirmation of Aššur's support. There are representations of lyre players and their instruments on cylinder seals, and on the Standard of Ur being played alongside a possible singer.Early in that millennium, Assyria was by far the most powerful empire of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Such instruments were probably important parts of rituals at court and temple. Eleven silver tubes acted as the tuning pegs. Some of the silver preserved the impression of matting on which it must have originally lain. The silver on the top and back edge of the sounding box had been destroyed. First it was photographed, and then covered in wax and waxed cloth to hold it together for lifting. The metal was very brittle and the uprights were squashed flat. The edges of the sound box have a narrow border of shell and lapis lazuli inlay. The silver cow's head decorating the front has inlaid eyes of shell and lapis lazuli. The plaques down the front of the sounding box are made of shell. They were all made from wood which had decayed by the time they were excavated, but two of them, of which this is one, were entirely covered in sheet silver attached by small silver nails. Three lyres were piled one on top of another. This lyre was found in the “Great Death-Pit,” one of the graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur accompanied by seventy-four bodies-six men and sixty-eight women-laid down in rows on the floor of the pit.
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