Eckart Frahm 2011 Commentaries
Frahm 2011 Commentaries
Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Origins of Interpretation,
Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record 5,
Münster: Ugarit-Verlag
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ToC of Frahm 2011 Commentaries
| Table of Contents |
1. Introduction 1.1. History of research 1.2. Scope and limits of the present study 1.3. Some conventions, and basic information on frequently mentioned texts 2. Philology and divination: ancestors and correlates of the commentary tradition 2.1. The Mesopotamian philological tradition 2.1.1. Lexical lists and similar inventories 2.1.2. Glosses 2.1.3. Translation 2.2. Mesopotamian omen texts 3. Tempiftal and geographical distribution of the commentaries 4. Typology of the commentaries 4.1. Medium 4.2. Relationship to the text commented on 4.3. Form 4.3.1. Tabular commentaries 4.3.2. Indentation type commentaries 4.3.3. Cola type commentaries 4.4. Explanation types 4.5. Commentary self-designations 4.5.1. Mukallimtu 4.5.2. Ṣâtu 4.5.3. Ṣâtu mukallimtu 4.5.4. Mašߴaltu and šūt pî 4.5.5. Multābiltu 4.5.6. Commentaries not designated with a technical term 5. Hermeneutic techniques used in Babylonian and Assyrian commentaries 5.1. Explanations of words and short expressions 5.1.1. Synonyms 5.1.2. Explanations of logograms 5.1.3. Complex synonym chains 5.1.4. Pronunciation of syllabic signs and logograms 5.1.5. Phonological variants 5.1.6. Morphological derivation and morphological variants 5.1.7. Antonyms 5.1.8. Paraphrases 5.1.9. Figurative interpretation 5.1.10. Etymology and etymography 5.1.11. Gematria 5.2. Explanations of larger text units 6. Sources of the explanations 6.1. Explanations ascribed to oral lore 6.2. Lexical and other lists 6.3. Other commentaries and explanatory texts 6.4. Omen texts 6.5. Rituals, incantations, prayers, and magico-medical texts 6.6. Cultic laments 6.7. Legal texts 6.8. Literary texts 6.9. Some remarks on the citation style of the commentaries 7. Texts commented on and their commentaries: an overview 7.1. Literary texts 7.1.1. Enūma eliš 7.1.1.1. A commentary on Enūma eliš I-VII 7.1.1.2. A commentary on the names of Marduk in Enūma eliš VII 7.1.1.3. Other explanatory treatises related to Enūma eliš 7.1.2. Lugal-e 7.1.3. Ludlul bēl nēmeqi 7.1.4. The "Babylonian Theodicy" 7.2. Rituals and incantations 7.2.1. Šurpu, Maqlû, and Tummu bītu 7.2.2. Udug-ḫul and "Marduk's Address to the Demons" 7.2.3. Namburbi rituals 7.2.4. Potency rituals (Šà-zi-ga) 7.2.5. A list of rituals 7.3. Omen texts 7.3.1. Astrology (Enūma Anu Enlil) 7.3.1.1. Commentary series on Enūma Anu Enlil 7.3.1.2. Commentary tablets dealing with larger numbers of Enūma Anu Enlil tablets 7.3.1.3. Commentaries on individual Enūma Anu Enlil tablets 7.3.1.4. The commentary series Sîn ina tāmartišu 7.3.1.5. Enūma Anu Enlil commentary fragments difficult to classify 7.3.1.6. A commentary on a "giskim text" (Mul-apin III?) 7.3.2. Extispicy (bārûtu) 7.3.2.1. Commentaries on the biirutu series 7.3.2.2. Niṣirti bārûti texts 7.3.2.3. Extispicy commentaries difficult to classify 7.3.3. Terrestrial omens (Šumma ālu) 7.3.3.1. Šumma ālu commentary types 7.3.3.2. Commentaries on "canonical" Ālu tablets 7.3.3.3. Commentaries on unidentified and non-canonical Ālu tablets 7.3.4. Teratology (Šumma izbu) 7.3.4.1. The "Principal Commentary" on Šumma izbu 7.3.4.2. Excerpts from the "Principal Commentary" 7.3.4.3. Other Izbu commentaries with a tabular layout 7.3.4.4. Late Babylonian cola type commentaries on Izbu from Uruk 7.3.4.5. Other Late Babylonian Izbu commentaries 7.3.5. Physiognomic omens (Alamdimmû) 7.3.5.1. A commentary on a nonstandard version of Alamdimmû, tablet 2 7.3.5.2. Other Alamdimmû commentaries 7.3.6. Menologies (Iqqur īpuš) 7.3.6.1. Commentaries on texts related to the Série générale 7.3.6.2. Commentaries on the Séries mensuelles 7.3.6.3. Unclassified commentaries on Iqqur īpuš 7.4. Medical texts 7.4.1. Diagnostic and prognostic texts (Sa-gig) 7.4.1.1. Commentaries on Sa-gig 7.4.2. Therapeutic texts 7.4.2.1. Commentaries on therapeutic texts from Nippur 7.4.2.2. Commentaries on therapeutic texts from Uruk 7.4.2.3. Commentaries on therapeutic texts from Sippar(?) I the Sippar Collection 7.4.2.4. Commentaries on therapeutic texts from Babylon 7.4.2.5. A commentary on a therapeutic text from Ur 7.5. Legal texts 7.6. Lexical and other lists 7.6.1. Aa 7.6.2. Diri 7.6.3. Nabnītu 7.6.4. ḪAR-ra and ḪAR-gud 7.6.5. A pharmacological-botanical text related to Uruanna 7.6.6. A grammatical text 7.6.7. A god list 7.7. Other text commentaries 7.8. Texts erroneously classified as commentaries 7.9. Unidentified and unpublished text commentaries 8. The socio-cultural milieu of Mesopotamian commentary studies 8.1. Mesopotamian library types 8.2. Assyrian libraries and tablet collections 8.2.1. Kalḫu 8.2.1.1. The tablet collection of Nabû-zuqup-kēnu 8.2.1.2. The library of the temple of Nabû 8.2.2. Assur 8.2.2.1. The library of a family of exorcists (N4) 8.2.2.2. Other libraries in Assur 8.2.2.3. Assur commentary tablets from unspecified findspots 8.2.3. Ḫuzirīna 8.2.4. Nineveh 8.2.4.1. Assurbanipal's libraries: general observations 8.2.4.2. Commentaries in Assurbanipal's libraries 8.2.4.3. Commentary tablets from Nineveh deriving from earlier tablet collections 8.2.4.4. The uses of cuneiform hermeneutics in Nineveh according to scholarly letters and reports 8.3. Babylonian libraries and tablet collections 8.3.1. Sippar 8.3.1.1. The library in Room 355 ofthe temple of Šamaš 8.3.1.2. The archives and libraries of Rooms 53 and 55 of the Šamaš temple 8.3.2. Uruk 8.3.2.1. The library of the Eanna temple 8.3.2.2. The libraries in area U XVIII 1 8.3.2.2.1. The library of Anu-ikṣur 8.3.2.2.2. The library of Iqīšāya 8.3.2.2.3. Commentaries from U XVIII 1 not ascribable to a specific library 8.3.2.3. The library of the Bīt rēš, and "privately" owned tablets possibly found there 8.3.3. Nippur 8.3.4. Babylon and Borsippa 8.3.4.1. The Assyrian period 8.3.4.2. The library of the Emašdari temple (sixth century BCE?) 8.3.4.3. The Esagil library and other Late Babylonian libraries in Babylon (and neighboring cities) 8.3.4.3.1. Commentaries whose colophons are preserved 8.3.4.3.2. Commentaries whose colophons are lost, and unpublished tablets 8.3.5. Dilbat 8.3.6. Ur 8.3.7. Babylonian commentaries of unknown origin 8.4. The cultural setting of Mesopotamian hermeneutics 9. Canonization and the formation of the commentary tradition 9.1. The origins of Mesopotamian text commentaries 9.2. New commentaries in later periods 10. Cultic commentaries and other "explanatory" texts 11 . A case study of Mesopotamian hermeneutics: The reception history of Enūma eliš 12. The legacy of Babylonian and Assyrian hermeneutics Appendix I. Selected text editions A. KAR 94: a Maqlû/Šurpu commentary from Assur B. SBTU 1, 47: a medical commentary from Uruk II. Some statistics A. Commentaries grouped after topics B. Commentaries grouped after provenances C. Commentaries written I found in individual cities grouped after topics D. Commentary layouts E. Commentary subscripts F. Commentaries grouped after approximate dates G. List of commentaries provided with a date formula |
| General topic(s) of the book |
“In his influential book on "the origin and goal of history," [...] Karl Jaspers claimed that the period from 800 to 200 BCE played a particularly crucial role in the intellectual history of man. Jaspers argued that in the centuries in question, dubbed by him the "axial age," thinking, for the first time in human history, became the object of itself. [...] The present work deals with a group of Mesopotamian texts that display various features of the self-conscious reflection Jaspers characterized as axial: Babylonian and Assyrian commentaries or, to be more precise, text commentaries. [...] The commentaries represent efforts of Babylonian and Assyrian scholars to explain the whole range of Babylonian literary, religious, and scholarly works, from epics and rituals to legal, medical and omen texts. Using a plethora of hermeneutical techniques, the commentaries provide unique insights into many aspects of how the Mesopotamian mind, in its numerous avatars, actually worked. [...] As meta-texts proper, they stand at the beginning of a tradition of "secondary literature" that features most prominently in the intellectual discourse of almost every major civilization. The significance of the Babylonian and Assyrian commentary tradition is thus threefold. First, the commentaries provide information on myriad aspects of Mesopotamian languages and civilization. [...] Second, they make it possible for us to investigate not only the central texts of ancient Mesopotamia, but also the meaning assigned to these texts by those who read and studied them, a meaning social anthropologists designate with the term "manifest content" [...]. And finally, when approached from a comparative perspective, the commentaries from Mesopotamia emerge as the earliest testimonies to the long and complex history of textual interpretation, an intellectual pursuit practiced all over the world. To one particularly prominent chapter in this history, the exegetical tradition of rabbinic Judaism, they may even be related genetically” (from author's Introduction on pp. 3-4). |
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Extended summary of Frahm 2011 Commentaries
“This book provides a new introduction to the text commentaries from Babylonia and Assyria. It first describes the Mesopotamian philological and divinatory traditions from which the commentaries emerged […], then discusses their temporal and geographic distribution […], and in the following chapters deals with their typology […], hermeneutical techniques […], and sources” (p. 6)
The volume illustrates through the analysis of Mesopotamian commentary tablets the way Ancient Babylonians and Assyrians made commentaries to texts of different genres. It is a clear exemplification of how ancient Mesopotamians approached their own literature.
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Excerpts from Frahm 2011 Commentaries
NOTE: The notes in square brackets and in smaller font are by the author of this excerpts page.
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Authorship (Mesopotamian ‘anonymity’ vs. Biblical ‘authorship’); canonicity
| Authorship (Mesopotamian 'anonymity' vs. Biblical 'authorship'); canonicity | p. 86 | A particularly striking feature of the cuneiform exegetical tradition is its anonymity. Subscripts on commentary tablets, while declaring that at least some of their explanations go back to certain "(master-)scholars" (ša pî ummâni), never actually identify these scholars by name. Such anonymity suggests that in ancient Mesopotamia, unlike later rabbinical, Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Christian traditions, it was apparently not only, and perhaps even not primarily, the commentator who provided the commentary with authority. Yet the commentaries, which were frequently copied, evidently did possess authority, and so the question arises where this authority actually came from. One answer seems to be that it derived from various canonical texts – texts that were excerpted and reproduced in the very explanations put forward in the commentaries. For many of these explanations are clearly not just some exegete's ad hoc attempts at understanding. They are, instead, quotations taken from the textual record that constituted the Mesopotamian "stream of tradition." Babylonian and Assyrian commentaries are not only meta-texts, that is, texts that say something new about other texts, but also inter-texts, texts that juxtapose passages from two or more different "pre-texts." Unfortunately, the modern student of Mesopotamian hermeneutics faces a serious problem: Only rarely do commentaries offer explicit references to the sources of their explanations. The reason for this lack of specificity is most probably that those who composed and copied the commentaries knew the quoted texts, at least to some extent, by heart. They had learnt them from schoolmasters and scholars who emphasized memorization and oral reproduction, and could assume comparable knowledge on the part of their intended audience. |
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‘Canon’ and ‘canonicity’ (Mesopotamia vs. Bible)
| 'Canon' and 'canonicity' (Mesopotamia vs. Bible) | pp. 317-318 | Despite the fact that during the past decades several authors have dealt with the phenomenon of "canonicity" in ancient Mesopotamia, no consensus has yet emerged as to whether it is really appropriate to apply this term to cuneiform text corpora. On one hand, skeptics [...] have recommended speaking of canonicity only sparingly, if at all, even with regard to first millennium texts. Rochberg-Halton concedes that "[by] the seventh century B.C. the tablets and series comprising the literature of the scholars in the 'scientific' disciplines of divination, medicine, and magic had attained a kind of literary stabilization in the sense that old material was conscientiously maintained in its traditional form and new material was no longer incorporated." But she nonetheless argues, in a statement that is based on a comparison of the Mesopotamian textual material with the Biblical "canon": "Since neither a process of canonization nor anything regarding a Babylonian notion of canonicity can be recognized in cuneiform sources, a cuneiform 'canon' proves difficult to define." W.W. Hallo, in contrast, postulates the existence of not just one Mesopotamian canon, but of four different ones following each other: an Old Sumerian canon (based on mythological and wisdom texts and known from the literary tablets from Fara), a Neo-Sumerian canon (which stresses the divine nature of the king), an Old Babylonian canon (which for the first time includes Akkadian texts), and a fourth canon, formed in the second half of the second millennium, which according to Hallo is to some extent characterized by a more prominent role of Sumero-Akkadian bilingual texts. Neither Rochberg's contention that there were no truly canonical cuneiform texts at all, nor Hallo's model of a sequence, starting in the middle of the third millennium, of several essentially equivalent stages of canonization in Mesopotamia is compatible with my hypothesis that the emergence of cuneiform commentaries – probably at the very end of the second millennium – represents a reaction to the creation of what was Mesopotamia's first corpus of canonical texts stricto sensu. To uphold this theory, it must be demonstrated, first, that certain scholarly, religious, and literary texts used in the first millennium and probably created in the late second did indeed have a "canonical" status – and, second, that the status of earlier bodies of texts, for example the Old Babylonian corpus of Sumerian literature, was somewhat different. |
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Coherence, rationality
| Coherence, rationality | pp. 80-81 | Quite a few commentaries seek to establish the coherence and rationality of their base texts. Commentators were particularly eager to find links between omen protases and apodoses, which at first glance often seemed to be put together without apparent reason. [...] Very rare, but not completely unattested, are "psychological" explanations of omen entries. |
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Divination culture (Mesopotamia)
| Divination culture (Mesopotamia) | p. 20 | More than any other ancient civilization, Mesopotamia can be characterized as a "divination culture." Archival sources, royal inscriptions, and year names teach us that extispicy and other forms of predicting the future were already practiced extensively in the third millennium. But their underlying principles were not yet put into writing at that time, a development that took place only during the Old Babylonian period, from which we have our earliest liver models, omen reports, divination-related prayers and rituals, and, most importantly, compendia that offer long lists of extispical, terrestrial, and astronomical omens. |
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Hermeneutic techniques (Mesopotamia vs. Bible)
| Hermeneutic techniques (Mesopotamia vs. Bible) | p. 59 | Early rabbinic scholarship has left us three lists of hermeneutic "rules" for how to interpret the Hebrew Bible: the seven, thirteen, or thirty-two middot ascribed to Hillel, Ishmael, and Eliezer ben Yose, respectively. They represent different approaches to an explicit "theory" of hermeneutics. The scholars of Babylonia and Assyria did apparently not produce such a theory – at least, they never put it into writing. This leaves the task of identifying the basic principles and procedures of cuneiform hermeneutics to the modern scholar, who has to deduce them by means of studying individual commentary entries. [...] The fundamental distinction between literal and non-literal modes of interpretation, for which the ancient scholars had their own terminology, [...] is not a factor in the more detailed classification of hermeneutical procedures provided here. Yet it will come as no surprise that to give simple synonyms normally leads to a literal interpretation of a passage, while etymological and etymographical analysis yields itself more to an "allegorical" approach. Some of the hermeneutical techniques described below are primarily geared towards bridging the gap between the cultural horizons of the ancient text and the commentator [...], while others provide supplementary knowledge on cuneiform signs or various linguistic phenomena. |
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Legacy of Mesopotamian hermeneutics to Judaism
| Legacy of Mesopotamian hermeneutics to Judaism | pp. 370-371 | The Judaic tradition seems likewise to have borrowed from Mesopotamian sources. Important foundations of this tradition were laid during the time of the Babylonian exile, when Judeans must have become acquainted, at least to some degree, with certain branches of the Mesopotamian sciences. Those who went back to Palestine spread their newly acquired wisdom in the West, while others stayed at the rivers of Babylon, consolidated their communities, some of which became thriving centers of Jewish scholarship, and continued to interact with their Babylonian neighbors. [...] Such an intellectual exchange would be quite feasible if recent arguments hold that cuneiform culture, even though increasingly limited to members of the temple communities, stayed alive in Babylonia [...]. Traces of Babylonian "sciences" can be found in a variety of Jewish texts. The physiognomic knowledge recorded in the fragmentary manuscripts 4Q186 [for which see Allegro 1968 D J D 5] and 4Q561 from Qumran may be indebted (even though only indirectly) to Alamdimmû, the Babylonian handbook of physiognomic omens, and cuneiform treatises that combine astrology and physiognomics. The Mishnah Middot, which deals with names and measurements of parts of the temple and the city of Jerusalem, recalls the topographical series Tintir and related works from Mesopotamia. And certain passages on medicine in the Babylonian Talmud display rather striking parallels with therapeutic prescriptions known from cuneiform texts. |
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Gematria (Mesopotamia vs. Bible)
| Gematria (Mesopotamia vs. Bible) | pp. 76-77 | Gematria is a hermeneutic technique, well known from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegesis, that manipulates numbers, or associates with them letters, signs, or words, in order to establish additional layers of meaning. [...] In Babylonian and Assyrian text commentaries, gematria is used only sporadically. This is not surprising. The cuneiform writing system provided so many different ways of reading and interpreting one and the same sign that the Mesopotamian exegetes, unlike their Rabbinical, Christian, and Islamic successors (who dealt with far less complex alphabetic writing systems), had no need to resort to gematria when trying to establish new readings of their texts – even though there was, in fact, a tradition of ascribing numerical values to cuneiform graphemes in first millennium Mesopotamia. |
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Mesopotamian hermeneutics (cultural setting)
| Mesopotamian hermeneutics (cultural setting) | pp. 313-314 | The preceding overview of the scribes and owners of cuneiform commentaries, and the libraries where these commentaries were stored, allows a number of conclusions. In the past, many Assyriologists have stressed the didactic aspects of the writing of commentaries. [...] It is certainly true that commentaries played a role in the education of Mesopotamian students – not in its elementary stages, when commentaries were not yet used, but in its more advanced phase. The most obvious indication of this is that the colophons of many commentary tablets, as we have seen in the preceding paragraphs, state explicitly that they were written by junior-exorcists (āšipu ṣeḫru) or junior-apprentices (šamallû ṣeḫru). The students who bear such titles had apparently acquired, in the course of their earlier schooling, some basic scribal skills, and they had managed to memorize a number of particularly important lexical lists, incantations, and literary texts by copying them many times. They had, however, not yet reached the ranks of established senior exorcists, astrologers, or diviners. Now, proceeding towards a professional career in the respective fields, they had to familiarize themselves with the manuals that true experts were supposed to know, and one of the tasks they had to perform to reach this goal was the study of text commentaries. [...] Education, however, was not the only purpose Mesopotamian text commentaries served. In fact, only very few of the commentary tablets found in Mesopotamia seem to be notes taken by some student during an oral presentation of a specific text by his teacher. Most of them [...] were copies of older tablets that students had to produce for their masters, masters who are frequently named in the colophons as the owners of the new tablets. Other scholarly, religious, and literary texts were copied by young apprentices in this way as well. Clearly, then, commentaries had a purpose that transcended pedagogy. Although copied by students, they were destined to become part of the libraries of the masters, who would be able to consult them whenever they sought for themselves clarification of some textual problem vexing them. The need of the masters to use written texts stored in an orderly fashion in their tablet collections instead of simply relying on their memory was something fairly new. In the Old Babylonian period, the concept of a library stricto sensu seems not yet to have existed, and most literary, religious, and scholarly texts apparently were written for educational purposes only. In the first millennium, in contrast, scholars, and also temples and, to some extent, palaces, were supposed to have respectable libraries of their own, and such libraries had to include commentaries – even though their number could vary from case to case. |
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Nature as a book (Mesopotamia)
| Nature as a book (Mesopotamia) | p. 21 | Mesopotamian scholars regarded nature as a book, or rather a tablet, that could be read by those who understood the way it was written. They made this connection quite literally by referring to the stars as šiṭir šamê/burūmê "heavenly writing," and to the liver of the sacrificial animal as ṭuppi ilāni "tablet of the gods." Babylonian and Assyrian diviners interpreted lesions or cysts on the surface of the exta as cuneiform signs, and specialists in physiognomy based their statements on the character and future destiny of individuals on finding such signs on their faces. |
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Theological statements
| Theological statements | pp. 82-83 | Some commentaries deal with rather elaborate theological statements. Of particular interest for Mesopotamian scholars were the numerous self-predications pronounced by the god Marduk in the exorcistic treatise "Marduk's Address to the Demons." [see Lambert 1956 Marduk]. The Assur commentary A 1 63408 provides explanations of this text that are based on ritual, cosmological, and other considerations. [...] Occasionally, commentaries provide what amounts to a theological "updating" of their base texts. |
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