Walther Sallaberger

Establishing Social Relations During the Preparation and Consumption of Food in Religious Festivals at Late Bronze Age Emar

Home-made Bread, Municipal Mutton, Royal Wine

Among cuneiform texts, only letters address directly a concrete historical person. Letters being texts composed and used in everyday verbal interaction, they replace direct communication. This specific situational context provokes basic questions such as: from the point of view of the ancient letter writer, what are the conventionally possible ways of expressing the intentions of the sender? And from the modern researcher's standpoint, how can we detect the 'tone' of a given letter? This study focuses neither on the facts represented and the persons communicating nor on the system of the language, but is rather concerned with the specific, rule-governed use of language in interaction. The method employed is a combination of the philological treatment of the texts with questions and insights from linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, and text linguistics. The book concentrates on the corpus of Old Babylonian letters from Mesopotamia. The topics treated include: address behaviour, i.e. use and interdependence of term of address, greeting, and form of address of the verb; the stucture and the basic function of an Old Babylonian letter; the polite speech acts of gratitude and of asking a favour; rational argumentation in everyday verbal interaction.

Interaktion und Textgestaltung in altababylonischen Alltagsbriefen

"Wenn Du mein Bruder bist,..."

Josef Bauer

Aage Westenholz

Akkade-Zeit und Ur III-Zeit

Der kultische Kalender der Ur III-Zeit

Nawala Ahmed Al-Mutawilli

Khalid Salim Ismaʻel

This is the first volume to appear in a series dedicated to the publication of the cuneiform texts from the Iraqi Excavations at Umma (Jokha) that were conducted in the years 1999-2002 by the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. The expedition was successful in uncovering the temple of the city-god Shara, built by king Shu-Suen of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2035-2027 BCE). About 130 years later, in the early years of king Sumuel of Larsa (1894-1866 BCE) the temple was still in use, as documented by the more than one hundred bullae discovered in a small room near the main entrance. The cuneiform documents written in Sumerian allow detailed insights in the functioning of the main temple of a Mesopotamian town. Every month the priests received large amounts of grain for offerings, for the temple's personnel or as fodder for its oxen, donkeys, horses, and sheep. The texts provide important new data for the history of lowland Mesopotamia in the Early Old Babylonian period. The cuneiform texts are published in transliteration, English and Arabic translation, with introduction, indexes, glossary, and photographs. The book also includes an archaeological chapter on the temple of Shara by N. A. Al-Mutawalli and H. S. Al-Harbi and a study of the seal images by A. Otto.

Bullae from the Shara Temple

Walther Sallaberger

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