Strings and Threads: A Celebration of the Work of Anne Draffkorn Kilmer

315 Pages·2011·6.45 MB·English

by  Wolfgang Heimpel

STRINGS AND THREADS
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Anne Kilmer, viewing the Ur lyre in the University Museum, Philadelphia, in 1954.
Photo courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
S TR I NG S A N D TH R E A D S
A Celebration of the Work of
Anne Draffkorn Kilmer
Edited by
W H and g f - S
olfgang eimpel abriella rantz zabó
Winona Lake, Indiana
eiSenbraunS
2011
© 2011 by Eisenbrauns Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

www.eisenbrauns.com
Drawing on the cover and beneath the title on p. iii
by Cornelia Wolff, Munich,
after C. L. Wooley, Ur Excavations 2 (1934), 105.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strings and threads : a celebration of the work of Anne Draffkorn Kilmer / edited by Wolfgang Heimpel
and Gabriella Frantz-Szabó.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57506-227-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn. 2. Music—Middle East—History and criticism. 3. Music archaeology—
Middle East. I. Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn. II. Heimpel, Wolfgang. III. Frantz-Szabó, Gabriella.
ML55.K55S77 2011
780.9—dc22
2011036676
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. †Ê
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
guitty azarpay The Imagery of the Manichean ‘Call’ on a
Sogdian Funerary Relief from China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Dominique Collon Chinless Wonders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
JerrolD S. Cooper Puns and Prebends: The Tale of Enlil and Namzitara. . . . 39
riCHarD l. CroCker No Polyphony before a.D. 900! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Daniel a. foxvog Aspects of Name-Giving in Presargonic Lagash . . . . . . . . 59
JoHn CurtiS franklin “Sweet Psalmist of Israel”: The Kinnôr and
Royal Ideology in the United Monarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
ellen HiCkmann Music Archaeology as a Field of
Interdisciplinary Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
a. bernarD knapp Sound of Silence: Music and Musical Practice
in Late Bronze–Iron Age Cyprus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
erle leiCHty A New Fragment of Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
SHerry lou maCgregor Foreign Musicians in Neo-Assyrian Royal Courts . . . . . . . 137
SCott b. noegel “Wordplay” in the Song of Erra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Diana piCkWortH Dug Ubur-Imin:
A Seven-Nipple Lid and Seven-Nipple Vessels . . . . . . . . . 195
eleanor robSon The Discovery of Professor von Saalbrandt:
A Philadelphia Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Jennifer C. roSS Lost: The Missing Lexical Lists of the Archaic Period . . . 231
DeniSe SCHmanDt-beSSerat Spirits and Demons of All Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
DaviD StronaCH A Pipes Player and a Lyre Player:
Notes on Three Achaemenid or Near-Achaemenid
Silver Rhyta Found in the Vicinity of Erebuni, Armenia . 251
riCHarD l. zettler Banqueting and Music:
An Early Dynastic I Sealing from Nippur . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Bibliography of Anne Draffkorn Kilmer’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Index of Anne Draffkorn Kilmer’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
v

Preface
For the academic year 1963–64, Anne Draffkorn Kilmer came as visiting lecturer in Assyriol-
ogy to the Department of Near Eastern Languages of the Berkeley Campus of the University of
California. Behind her were the Ph.D. from the University of Philadelpia, in 1959, with a disserta-
tion on Hurrians and Hurrian at Alalakh, a topic dear to her Doktorvater, the eminent Assyriologist
E. A. Speiser. Behind her were 4 formative years as research assistant at the Oriental Institute of
the University of Chicago (1957–61), where Benno Landsberger had made her a close collabora-
tor on his project of editing lexical texts. Finally, behind her was a one-year research fellowship
from the American Association of University Women, during which time she followed up on the
topic of her dissertation.
In Berkeley, Anne’s familiarity with lexical texts came to the fore again. Her interest in math-
ematics, animals, entertainment, and especially music soon concentrated on lists of the Sumerian
and Akkadian designations of the strings found on stringed instruments. An article on “their
names, numbers, and significance” was published in the Festschrift for Landsberger (1965), to be
followed by the “discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian theory of music,” published in the 1971
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Her discoveries were spectacularly unexpected and
dramatic. In her words: “it cannot have escaped the reader familiar with Greek theory that the or-
der of the Babylonian (octave) species is the same as that of the Greek species in Ptolemy’s system
when arranged in the order dictated by their names: Dorian, hypo-Dorian, Phrygian, and so forth.”
This was not all. String notations in the text of a Hurrian cult song from Ugarit indicated to
her that the song was accompanied by playing chords. To Anne, this suggested the existence of
heterophony rather than homophony—the latter commonly supposed to be the only way music
was played in classical antiquity and earlier. Anne’s suggestion of the use of “chords” and “het-
erophony” in her 1974 paper was not accepted by the small crowd of musicologists familiar with
her work—but it was received by the rest of the world. In that year, Berkeley physicist Robert R.
Brown built for her a replica of an ancient lyre, and the Berkeley musicologist Richard L. Crocker
played the chords on that lyre at the occasion of a noon lecture, which came in two parts: on the
first day was the lecture proper, followed a week later by a performance. In her words:
After my first noon lecture, the University’s information office was telephoned by the local press,
as it always is, and asked “what’s new on campus?” The man who was in charge of that office said
“Well, we’ve just had an interesting lecture by Professor Kilmer on ancient Babylonian music.” The
local press said “That’s exciting?” When they heard there would be a demonstration at the next
noon lecture in Wheeler Auditorium, they sent a number of people from the press to Wheeler Au-
ditorium where Crocker played, and somehow that got into the international media.
This is the part of Anne’s work that is reflected in the label “strings” in the title of this volume. The
latest step in this still-evolving story is Richard Crocker’s contribution to this volume.
The “threads” refer to another central part of Anne’s work, the intricate symmetry of compo-
sition of Mesopotamian narrative texts, which can be visualized as weaving a rug.
vii
viii Preface
In many of her articles, Anne observes things hitherto not considered, often starting with ob-
servations that have come from her students, which are always acknowledged. A spectacular case
in point is the flood story as a tale of rebirth of life. The calculation of the number of days of the
biblical flood computed by a doctoral student was 278 days to the day when the dove returned
with a twig in its beak. Anne recalls: “I asked those biblical scholars present (at the rigorosum)
whether anyone had noticed that the number of days is exactly the time for human gestation. . . .
My query was met with surprise.”
Another case is Anne’s recognition of the relevance of wordplay in the telling of one of Gil-
gamesh’s dreams that presages his friendship with Enkidu, which led “to a line of thinking that
reverses the trend to reject the notion that there was a sexual relationship between Giglamesh
and Enkidu.”
Such gems are found in all of Anne’s writings; they are there for us all to find.
More than most of us, Anne was fully engaged in the life and administration of the university,
as curator of the Babylonian collection in the Lowie (now Phoebe Hearst) Museum, repeatedly
as chair of the department of Near Eastern Studies, as dean of humanities, and as chair of the
Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate.
During my last visit to Anne’s office in Berkeley, I saw along the short side of her desk a neat
line of labels with abbreviations. It was list of her writing projects. The line was long. Some are
now published. Many are yet to be written.
We did not cast a wide net when we started this volume, inviting friends and close colleagues
of Anne. We all, contributors and editors, congratulate Anne for her outstanding contributions
and thank her for being our colleague and friend.
Wolfgang Heimpel and gabriella frantz-Szabó
Abbreviations
A Siglum of objects in the Oriental Institute Museum
ActIr Acta Iranica
AfO Archiv für Orientforschung
AHw Akkadisches Handwörterbuch
AO Antiquités Orientales. Siglum of objects in the Musée du Louvre
AoN Altorientalische Notizen
AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament
ARET Archivi Reali di Ebla Testi
ArOr Archiv Orientální
ASJ Acta Sumerologica
AT D. J. Wiseman, The Alalakh Tablets. London, 1953.
ATU Archaische Texte aus Uruk
BAM F. Köcher et al., Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen
BaM Baghdader Mitteilungen
BiOr Bibliotheca Orientalis
BM British Museum
BSA Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
CAD Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
CANE Civilizations of the Ancient Near East
CBS Siglum of tablets in the Philadelphia University Museum
CDLI Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. http://cdli.ucla.edu/
CM Cuneiform Monographs
CNRS Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
CT Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum
DAI Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
ED Early Dynastic
ePSD Electronic Philadelphia Sumerian Dictionary. http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-
frame.html
ÉRC Édition Recherche sur les Civilisations
ETCSL The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/
Hh ḪAR-RA ḫubullu (lexical series)
HS Tablet Siglum of The Frau Professor Hilprecht Sammlung.
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
ICTM International Council for Traditional Music
IM Iraq Museum
Iraq Iraq: Journal of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq
Ist Istanbul Museums
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
K Siglum of tablets from Kuyunjik in the British Museum
ix