by Eckart Frahm
While the Assyrian scholars relied heavily upon the Babylonian tradition, they also authored specific Assyrian texts and text genres. First and foremost among these were long and complex royal inscriptions relating the military activities of a king. Although the heyday of the genre was the Neo‐Assyrian period, the earliest examples of royal inscriptions dealing elaborately with the campaigns of a king date back to Adad‐nirari I (1295–1264 [1305–1274] BCE). From the same reign stems the first example of the distinct Assyrian literary genre of the royal epic, celebrating the exploits of specific kings. Most of these royal epics are extant in a quite fragmentary state. One of the better‐preserved examples is the still rather incomplete epic of Tukulti‐Ninurta I, about his conquest of Babylonia, which goes to great lengths to illustrate the ingenuity and might of that king. Possible models for the creation of the Assyrian royal epics are the Old Babylonian legends of the Old Akkadian kings (Foster 2005: 107–21). This distinct emphasis on the Assyrian kingship evident in royal inscriptions and epics can also be traced in the Assyrian royal hymns, prayers, and psalms.
The Alleged Royal Library of Tiglath‐pileser I
Most of the Middle Assyrian and Middle Babylonian scholarly texts from Ashur were excavated in the southwestern court of the Assur Temple, in area hD10V and the adjacent areas. The southwestern court, called the “court of Nunamnir,” dates from the extensive reconstruction of the Assur Temple by Shalmaneser I (1263–1234 [1273–1244] BCE). Most of the tablets were found along the northwestern wall and in adjacent rooms of the court, as well as in its northwestern gate, which was presumably called the “Enpi‐gate” (Pedersén 1985–6, II: 12f.). It is likely that they all belonged to a library originally situated in or above the “Enpi‐gate” and that the tablets crashed to the ground during the destruction of the city in the year 614 BCE. Ernst Weidner, who was the first to call attention to this library, considered it to be a state archive and library that was founded by Tukulti‐Ninurta I as a collection of his Babylonian booty and expanded by Tiglath‐pileser with Assyrian tablets (Weidner 1952–3). The interpretation of the texts from the southwestern court of the Assur Temple as the royal library of Tiglath‐pileser I has met with criticism. Wilfred G. Lambert rejected the idea of a royal library since the colophons of the tablets indicate a private origin, and he proved the alleged creation of the library by Tukulti‐Ninurta to be founded on a highly problematic text restoration (Lambert 1976: 85f. fn. 2). Helmut Freydank showed that many of the tablets, especially those with lexical content, which were formerly dated to the reign of Tiglath‐pileser I, were actually written forty to fifty years before his accession to power (Freydank 1991: 95f., 225). While these corrections to the view proposed by Weidner substantiate doubts about a direct royal endowment for this library, its official character is evidenced in that it was situated within the most important Assyrian sanctuary. What remains uncertain is whether the tablets were originally part of private libraries and only later incorporated into the collection above the “Enpi‐gate” or whether they were indeed “official” tablets, directly written for the library.
The problem of identifying the original depository of these Middle Assyrian scholarly texts raises the fundamental issue of “private versus official” in the ancient Near East and is related to the fact that we know very little about the scholars who wrote the texts, apart from the sparse and often ambiguous information contained in the colophons. The closeness of some scholars to the court and the king is evident from titles such as “king’s scribe,” “king’s exorcist,” or “king’s diviner,” which were used in many colophons. Furthermore, titles such as rab bāri’ē “chief of the diviners” and rab āšipē “chief of the exorcists” indicate a kind of rank order within the group of scholars at the court (Jakob 2003: 509–40). Unfortunately, the sources are silent about the remuneration of these scholars, or what kind of training they were expected to have received. Based on the naming of fathers and grandfathers who bore the same title in colophons of scholarly texts, we can assume that a scholar’s education would have been carried out within the family, the sons learning the craft of their father, as was customary in the ancient Near East.
Middle Assyrian Scholarly Families
Tracing the families of Middle Assyrian scholars back more than one or two generations is difficult, however. This is illustrated by the case of the diviner Šamaš‐zera‐iddina, who wrote at least four manuals about extispicy during the time of Tiglath‐pileser I, all of which were found in Ashur and which name Šamaš‐zera‐iddina’s father, Šamaš‐šuma‐lešir. A diviner bearing the same name, Šamaš‐šuma‐lešir, is attested in a list of high‐ranking officials during the reign of Tukulti‐Ninurta I, and Claudio Saporetti, considering the eighty‐three years time span between the death of Tukulti‐Ninurta I and the beginning of the reign of Tiglath‐pileser I, surmised that this could be a case of paponymy – the grandson bearing the same name as the grandfather – a rather common pattern in Mesopotamia (Saporetti 1978). Furthermore, Saporetti proposed that the father of the younger Šamaš‐šuma‐lešir was a certain Šamaš‐nadin‐ae, whom a colophon of an extispicy manual found in Ashur presents as the son of Šamaš‐šuma‐[broken], according to Saporetti the Šamaš‐šuma‐[lešir] from the time of Tukulti‐Ninurta I. Thus Saporetti determined a sequence of four generations of diviners, all connected by the same theophoric element Šamaš in their names:
This elegant reconstruction, though convincing at first glance, presents several problems. On the one hand, as Stefan Jakob (2003: 526 fn. 92) notes, at least one more generation should be assumed between the second and third scholar, which would put into question that paponymy was at play. What is more, the tablets of Šamaš‐nadin‐ae are written in Babylonian script and represent genuine Babylonian tablets, which were most likely not produced in Assyria but brought there from Babylonia. Therefore, Saporetti’s attempt to connect the two families of Šamaš‐zera‐iddina and Šamaš‐nadin‐ae must be considered to have failed.
The few attestations of scholars in texts concerning daily life testify to their preeminent positions in society, showing, for example, that a diviner had to tend to the regular supply of sacrificial offerings to the Assur Temple using his own means, or that diviners were sent by the king on important missions (Jakob 2003: 524 fn. 81 and 528). However, the clearest evidence for the importance of scholars at the court might be seen in the fact that, at least from the time of Tukulti‐Ninurta I onwards, the Assyrian kings, in accordance with Babylonian practice, kept their own personal scholars, the ummân šarri “king’s scholar.” Due to its closeness to the center of power and probably also because of its lucrativeness, the position of personal scholar to a king was the most prestigious and coveted position within the scholarly community. The significance of the title ummân šarri is illustrated by the fact that the synchronistic king list from Ashur, which lists the kings of Assyria and Babylonia in historical order side by side, adds the name of important ummân šarri to the kings they served (Heeßel 2010: 164f.).
Thanks to the support provided by Middle Assyrian kings who were interested in scholarly knowledge, especially from Babylonia, Ashur evolved into a center of scholarship in which new texts and text genres were created and texts acquired from Babylonia were compiled into new text series. This development brought Assyrian scholarship into conflict with its Babylonian counterpart, as thenceforth no center of scholarship existed in Mesopotamia that was acknowledged both in Babylonia and in Assyria and thus could claim supremacy in this phase of serializing the most important scholarly texts. It is hardly surprising that, on the one hand, the new Assyrian texts and text series were not studied in Babylonia, and, on the other hand, later Babylonian innovations were not approved in Ashur. A telling example of this is the serialization of the medical‐diagnostic and physiognomic texts by the Babylonian scholar Esagil‐kin‐apli, who worked as ummânu of the Babylonian king Adad‐apla‐iddina (1068–1047 BCE). His revised editions of already serial
ized texts were not used in Ashur, and it is very likely that they were even actively rejected (Heeßel 2010). At the same time, new works by Assyrian scholars did not enter the Babylonian tradition and had no wider impact.
The Scholars of Ashur between the Ninth and the Seventh Century bce
The city of Ashur suffered a major loss in significance when the Assyrian capital and seat of the court was moved to Kalu, modern Nimrud, during the reign of Aššurnaṣirpal II (883–859 BCE). However, this was not a complete decline, as Ashur remained the place with the most important temple of the nation: the seat of Assur, the main deity of Assyria. And even if the king might have visited the city only for a few weeks each year in order to be present at high festivities, Ashur still remained the place where the Assyrian kings were buried. Furthermore, the Assyrian kings did not cease their building activities in the former capital and still maintained the many temples and palaces there. Nonetheless, Aššurnaṣirpal’s move led to serious repercussions for the scholars of Ashur, since they lost not only their closeness to the court, but also had to witness the increasing influence that Babylonian scholarship had on the king and his entourage. In Kalu, and then in Nineveh, where king Sennacherib (704–681 BCE) had relocated his capital in the seventh century, scholars received with great attention Babylonian texts and text series, especially literary, divinatory, and lexical works, while largely ignoring the Ashur tradition (Heeßel 2010). And yet, even if Ashur was no longer the place to be for ambitious savants, the city was still home to many families of scholars, some of whom served the king in leading positions at the temples.
Among the several libraries of Neo‐Assyrian scholars brought to light by the excavations in Ashur, the collections of the scribe Nabû‐au‐iddina and his son Šumma‐balaṭ, as well as the collection of the chief singer Aššur‐šumu‐iškun, illustrate well the kind of professional texts that these scholars studied and with which they worked.
However, the most substantial, eminent, and complete private library found in Ashur, and probably in first millennium BCE Mesopotamia in general, is the library of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family, whose members served as chief exorcists for the Assur Temple (Pedersén 1998: 81–4). The house of this family, which was situated in the middle of the town, was destroyed during the sack of Ashur in 614 BCE by the combined forces of Medes and Babylonians. The “bookshelves” in the library room collapsed and the tablets were scattered and broken on the ground.
The excavators found some 1200 texts and fragments from the library, most of them closely related to the activities of the exorcists who owned them (Maul 2003, 2010). The tablets were essentially compiled by three generations of scholars, Nabû‐bessunu, his son Kiṣir‐Aššur, and Kiṣir‐Aššur’s nephew Kiṣir‐Nabû. Each held the title of mašmaš bīt Aššur “exorcist of the Assur Temple” at the height of their careers, as did Nabû‐bessunu’s father Baba‐šumu‐ibni; the office was apparently handed down within the family. Furthermore, based on the titles these scholars use in the colophons of their tablets, it is possible to trace their professional career from “young assistant” and “assistant” via “young assisting exorcist” and “young exorcist” to “(full) exorcist” and, finally, “exorcist of the Assur Temple” (Maul 2010: 207–10). Through dated texts and a reference to Kiṣir‐Aššur in a letter, we are able to date the period in which the tablet collection was compiled to around 690–614 BCE, the heyday of the Neo‐Assyrian empire.
The library of the family of Baba‐šumu‐ibni contained the entire range of literature used by the exorcists to fulfill their main task: maintaining the welfare of the land and the people and preventing disaster, disease, and harm from befalling them (Jean 2006: 147–53; Maul 2010: 196–9). This included texts to appease angered gods, invocations and prayers in Sumerian and Akkadian, elaborate directions for ritual purity, and instructions for the performance of the regular temple cult and specific religious festivities. Quite a large number of texts in the library list ominous signs, whose perception and correct interpretation could warn the exorcist of divine displeasure before it took shape as disaster. Namburbi‐rituals were used to alter a divine judgment, which manifested itself as a calamity in an omen, and to reconcile those affected by bad omens with their gods. If averting the danger in advance had not been successful, exorcists used compendia that included detailed healing instructions for all kinds of diseases and rituals for counteracting demons, ghosts, and witchcraft, which could cause disease and misfortune. Lists of plants, stones, and other types of materia medica, some of which delineate their pharmaceutical effects, illustrate the exorcist’s close relationship with the art of healing as well. Rituals for the protection of temples, palaces, houses, and livestock from attacks by demons, witches, and other malicious powers show that exorcists attended not only to humans but also to their property. Several rituals covering such diverse themes as enhancing the revenue of a tavern, bringing back a runaway slave, winning the affections of someone loved, sobering a drunken man, or overcoming the estrangement of long‐separated individuals attest to all kinds of magical manipulations that the exorcist used to answer the needs of his clients. Commentaries on rituals, prescriptions, and divinatory treatises, which explain the subtleties of difficult scholarly texts, demonstrate the academic interests of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family. A manuscript of the widely used “manual of the exorcist” (Geller 2000), which compiles all of the texts that were mandatory for the teaching and studying exorcists were engaged in, proves how complete the library of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family was; two‐thirds of the works mentioned in the manual can be shown to have been part of it.
In addition to the texts directly related to their profession, the library of Baba‐šumu‐ibni’s descendents includes myths and fables, lexical lists, Sumerian‐Akkadian dictionaries, and collections of old cuneiform signs used at the end of the third millennium BCE. Sometimes, certain texts provide insight into special duties carried out by the members of the family, as in the case of the many new ritual texts regarding the New Year festivities in Ashur. Much space is also devoted to historical‐religious questions, perhaps in reaction to the fact that, as a result of the conquest of Babylon, the Assyrian state cult was reorganized. Archival texts from the library that deal with the management of the Assur Temple indicate that the scholars, in addition to their professional duties, also fulfilled more mundane tasks in the administration. For example, Kiṣir‐Aššur and his relatives kept records regarding the issuing of offerings for sacrifices during festivities and the distribution of rations for workers employed by the temple.
Unfortunately, we have no information on the sources of income the family of Baba‐šumu‐ibni had, or other financial advantages that came with their office as chief exorcists. Furthermore, since only a limited part of the area occupied by their house was excavated, we do not know how large and prosperous their residence was. It is, therefore, impossible to evaluate the financial situation of the family. At the very least, the finding of several brick boxes below the floor that still contained the magical figurines deposited there when the house was built reveals that the exorcists followed their own advice in protecting their home against demons, diseases, and other evil by placing magical figurines at precarious points in the house, just as it was detailed in ritual texts found in their library.
It is evident from texts in the library of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family, as well as from other Neo‐Assyrian scholarly texts, that scholars in Ashur were in direct contact with colleagues in other Assyrian scribal centers, especially in Nineveh, either copying for them or exchanging tablets with them. Kiṣir‐Aššur himself is mentioned in a letter of the highly influential “temple‐enterer” Akkullanu, who reported that Kiṣir‐Aššur was busy copying the lexical series Urra = ubullu for Assurbanipal’s library in Nineveh (Villard 1998). An astrological commentary from Nineveh can be shown to have been written either by Kiṣir‐Aššur or by his nephew Kiṣir‐Nabû (Frahm 2004: 47 fn. 18). Other Nineveh texts,
including a section of an extispicy commentary (Koch‐Westenholz 2000: 137 no. 19/32) and an invocation to Ištar (Gurney et al. 1936/37: 368f., pl. 6, line 8), state in their colophons that they were written according to originals from Ashur. It is, moreover, noteworthy that two manuscripts, one from Nineveh and one from the library of the Baba‐šumu‐ibni family, of a divinatory text concerned with the ominous results of the observation of ants exhibit the scribal remark “broken” in exactly the same six places in the text. Both tablets must have been copied from the same Babylonian original, which illustrates that Ashur and Nineveh shared their knowledge (Heeßel 2007: 6f.). Incidentally, we also learn from this that Ashur, even after losing its outstanding position as the center of Assyrian scholarship, which the city had enjoyed since Middle Assyrian times, was still a place where scholarly activities of some significance took place. It is for a reason that Sargon II (721–705 BCE), in his highly poetic and learned account in which he describes his eighth campaign, praises Ashur as the “city of wisdom and intellectual insights” (Pongratz‐Leisten 1997: 101).
