Klaus Wagensonner

This lavishly illustrated volume gives a voice to women who lived millennia ago in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and explores their roles, representations and contributions to society.

Tens of thousands of cuneiform texts, monumental sculptures, and images on terracotta reliefs and cylinder seals cast light on the fates of women at the dawn of history, from queens to female slaves. In the patriarchal world of ancient Mesopotamia, women were often represented in their relation to men—as mothers, daughters, or wives—giving the impression that a woman’s place was in the home. But, as we explore in this volume, they were also authors and scholars, astute business-women, sources of expressions of eroticism, priestesses with access to major gods and goddesses, and regents who exercised power on behalf of kingdoms, states, and empires.

This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Babylonian Collection in the Sterling Memorial Library, showcasing artefacts and texts relating to women, many never exhibited or published before.

A stunning guide to the highlights housed within the Yale Babylonian Collection, presenting new perspectives on the society and culture of the ancient Near East

The Yale Babylonian Collection houses virtually every genre, type, and period of ancient Mesopotamian writing, ranging from about 3000 B.C.E. to the early Christian Era. Among its treasures are tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh and other narratives, the world’s oldest recipes, a large corpus of magic spells and mathematical texts, stunning miniature art carved on seals, and poetry by the first named author in world history, the princess Enheduanna.

This unique volume, the companion book to an exhibition at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, celebrates the Yale Babylonian Collection and its formal affiliation with the museum. Included are essays by world-renowned experts on the exhibition themes, photographs and illustrations, and a catalog of artifacts in the collection that present the ancient Near East in the light of present-day discussion of lived experiences, focusing on family life and love, education and scholarship, identity, crime and transgression, demons, and sickness.
Agnete W. Lassen is associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Eckart Frahm is professor of Assyriology at Yale University. Klaus Wagensonner is a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University.

PREFACE 
 
We present here as the sixth volume of the series “Wiener Offene Orientalistik” a collection of 23 essays entitled “The Empirical Dimension of Ancient Near Eastern Studies – Die empirische Dimension altorientalischer Forschungen.” The contributions address the relationship between Assyriological research and science from different perspectives. This volume was conceptualized after a symposium organized with the university’s Oriental Institute between 18th and 21st of July 2007, in order to honour Hermann Hunger on the occasion of his retirement. The programme of the symposium listed the following contributions: 
1. Lis Brack-Bernsen: „Worte und Zahlen: Entzifferung von babylonischen astronomischen Vorhersageregeln / Words and Numbers: unravelling Babylonian Astronomical Predicting Rules“ 2. John Steele: „Goal Year Periods and Their Use in Predicting Planetary Phenomena“ 3. Salvo de Meis: „Some hints from the Astronomical diaries and other works by Hermann Hunger“ 4. Hans J. Nissen: „Vor der Schrift“ 5. Martha Roth: „Philological basic research: On the history of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary“ 6. Karen Radner: „The king and his scholars: How representative are the letters to Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal?“ 7. Dominique Charpin: „Zur Funktion mesopotamischer Tempel“ 8. Tzvi Abusch: „Omens and Voodoo-Death in Ancient Mesopotamia“ 
We wish to express our gratitude to those colleagues who asked for an eventual publication of their—revised—contributions. We are indebted even more to the other authors who agreed to contribute to this volume, which is far from being normal in the present difficult situation of the universities. An increasing teaching load on a college level at one side and the quest for excellence financed from the outside and within the framework of elaborated but not always feasible and sensible projects consume much time, leaving little time for actual research. The contributions and discussions of Hermann Hunger’s important works on the history of astronomy formed the point of departure for this volume. In the last decades his work became known far beyond the field of cuneiform specialists. An attempt to pay homage to Hermann Hunger was made with the publication of numerous essays in his Festschrift, which appeared 2007 as volume 97 of the Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (M. Köhbach, R. Lohlker, S. Procházka and G.J. Selz, eds.). Despite the fact that Hermann Hunger was very supportive of the present volume’s concept, he insisted, in his well-known modesty, that it must not become a second “Festschrift.” Accordingly, whereas a number of contributions are related to Hunger’s research programme, others originate from quite different fields of Assyriology. The title we chose for this volume and to which contributions were asked, is not very specific. In fact, it encapsulates two possible ways of understanding. In one interpretation the theme asks after the relevance of empiricism for the field of Near Eastern Studies, but on the other hand, it does also refer to possible contributions of Ancient Near Eastern studies to the history of sciences. As we see it, this opaqueness turned into an advantage. The authors approached the topic from very different angles. Given this freedom it is of course unavoidable that the thematic relevance of the contributions to the theme is also varying. The conceptualization of this volume and the ongoing discussions in Assyriology prevented us from choosing a more programmatic heading as we find it, for example, in the famous works of G.E.R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience (1979) or of S.J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (1990). It is well known that divination was the most prominent field for the Mesopotamian scholars, but as there were a number of excellent editions and studies published in the last decades, magic
became not a salient topic. Nevertheless magical concepts cannot be overlooked when one discusses epistemic concepts, related to definitions of “science,” as some contributions do. But, even when we insist on the hypothesis that Mesopotamian knowledge acquisition was primarily empirically based, we are well aware of the fact that all empiricism is based on an epistemic framework. Hence, perception, observation or empiricism deal just with one side of Mesopotamian culture. Epistemic concepts – both ancient and modern – as important as they are, are not in the centre of this volume. Nevertheless, some contributions do address these forms of Mesopotamian knowledge, a topic for which, we feel much further research is wanted. The two major questions of this collection, namely how much Assyriological research can contribute to the different fields in the history of science, and which role empiricism played in the implicit and explicit construction of Mesopotamian scholarship are certainly not fully answered. Such a collection of essays, as offered here to the reader, neither would nor could do so. Our aim was to draw attention to and eventually shed some light on the relevance of empirical approaches in Ancient Near Eastern studies. If we could demonstrate this, eventually beyond the circle of specialists, this undertaking was not in vain. Finally it has to be mentioned that the sometimes difficult task of layouting was entirely done by Klaus Wagensonner in his spare time. The indices were  prepared with the help of Nadia Linder (University of Vienna). The printing of this book was supported by grants from the Austrian Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung and the Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universität Wien. 
 
Vienna, November 2010

The corpus of sourced obsidian glyptic objects, like inscribed amulets and cylinder seals, is virtually nonexistent across the Near East. Here we report our findings for two obsidian amulets and two cylinder seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection and Metropolitan Museum of Art. We analyzed the artifacts using portable X-ray fluorescence, which is quantitative, nondestructive, and deployable virtually anywhere in the world. Our results establish that, for such objects, style is an unreliable predictor of obsidian source. Although the amulets are meant to protect against the same demon, they reflect different styles, skill in stone cutting, and knowledge of cuneiform, and their contexts of production must have considerably differed. The amulets' obsidian sources, however, are identical: the Kömürcü outcrops of the Göllü Dağ volcanic complex in Anatolia. The two cylinder seals exhibit typical Old Babylonian style and iconography, and the seals' obsidians are indistinguishable to the naked eye. One seal, however, matches the Anatolian “Bingöl B" source, one of the most important sources in Mesopotamia. The other seal matches an obsidian source that is only known from a vessel fragment unearthed from the Egyptian site of Abydos. This is, to our knowledge, the first time that Egyptian-tied obsidian has been chemically identified amongst Mesopotamian, Anatolian, or Levantine artifacts. Our findings tantalizingly suggest that such artifacts likely had more complex origins than has previously been appreciated. These results also hint that such objects might have been produced closer to the context of their use rather than nearer the volcanic sources of the stone.

Imaging the three-dimensional cuneiform characters, written in clay, metal and on stone, has been a challenge since Carsten Niebuhr, Henry Rawlinson and Julius Oppert published the first of these inscriptions in the 19th century. Since then, hundreds of thousands of these inscriptions have been drawn, photographed, scanned; vectorized, hologramed. They have been included and assembled in printed publications, online databases and annotated media. Today, the importance of imaging these inscriptions is highlighted by the rapid destruction of this shared world heritage in the Near East, and an understanding that all inscribed objects from the ancient Near East are fragile. In our talk we want to ask what do specialists need; what are the requirements that both Assyriologists and colleagues from related fields expect from the visual documentation of ancient inscribed artifacts? In recent years, interactive 2D+ and 3D models of ancient inscriptions have been produced that conceal metric data which surpass the pure imaging purpose. But reliance on such cutting edge technologies comes at a great increase in cost (equipment, capture and processing time), potentially limiting access to the data. Producing images of ancient inscribed artifacts, and making them available with searchable metadata allows research to ask both traditional research questions as well as entirely new ones, in fact, we may not always know what questions researchers will ask of the data. In this paper, we will draw on our expertise in cultural heritage imaging built up over the past two decades in Leuven (portable dome project) and Los Angeles-Oxford-Berlin (CDLI), and suggest a sustainable path towards imaging any and all cuneiform documents.

Maria Bianca D’Anna, Carolin Jauß, J. Cale Johnson (eds.)
With contributions by Klaus Wagensonner, Carolin Jauß, Susan Pollock,
Eva Rosenstock, Rémi Berthon, J. Cale Johnson,
Maria Bianca D’Anna, Jacob Dahl, and Hagan Brunke.

Food has played a key role in the emergence of urbanization in Mesopotamia throughout the fourth millennium BCE. Although the food itself is only rarely preserved, we do have a great deal of evidence for the production, redistribution and administration of food and beverages in the Late Uruk period archaeological and textual record. The papers collected here derive from a workshop of the same name that took place in Berlin in March 2014 at the Freie Universität Berlin and was funded by Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation in Tours. The workshop brought together specialists from different disciplines such as archaeology, philology and archaeozoology, all of which take the material remains of the Mesopotamian Late Uruk period as their object of investigation. Through the combination of different datasets on Uruk foodways, these papers provide a snapshot of current research on Late Uruk food procurement, processing, consumption and administration.