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TextsandContexts Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records General Editor: Gonzalo Rubio Editors: Nicole Brisch, Petra Goedegebuure, Markus Hilgert, Amélie Kuhrt, Peter Machinist, Piotr Michalowski, Cécile Michel, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, D. T. Potts, Kim Ryholt Volume 9 Texts and Contexts The Circulation and Transmission of Cuneiform Texts in Social Space Edited by Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger DE GRUYTER ISBN978-1-61451-717-7 e-ISBN(PDF)978-1-61451-537-1 e-ISBN(EPUB)978-1-61451-963-8 ISSN2161-4415 LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData ACIPcatalogrecordforthisbookhasbeenappliedforattheLibraryofCongress. BibliographicinformationpublishedbytheDeutscheNationalbibliothek TheDeutscheNationalbibliothekliststhispublicationintheDeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailedbibliographicdataareavailableontheInternetathttp://dnb.dnb.de. ©2015WalterdeGruyterInc.,Boston/Berlin Typesetting:MetaSystemsPublishing&PrintservicesGmbH,Wustermark Printingandbinding:CPIbooksGmbH,Leck ♾Printedonacid-freepaper PrintedinGermany www.degruyter.com Contents PaulDelneroandJacobLauinger 1 Introduction ReassemblingtheSocialfromTextsandContexts 1 Textual Circulation and Performance DanielE.Fleming 2 Emar’sentuInstallation RevisingRitualandTextTogether 29 GojkoBarjamovic 3 ContextualizingTradition Magic,LiteracyandDomesticLifeinOldAssyrianKanesh 48 PaulDelnero 4 TextsandPerformance TheMaterialityandFunctionoftheSumerianLiturgicalCorpus 87 Textual Circulation and Administrative Praxis ChristopherWoods 5 ContingencyTablesandEconomicForecastingintheEarliestTextsfrom Mesopotamia 121 StevenJ.Garfinkle 6 UrIIIAdministrativeTexts BuildingBlocksofStateCommunity 143 MichaelKozuh 7 Policing,Planning,andProvisos TheFunctionofLegalTextsintheManagementoftheEannaTemple’s LivestockintheFirstMillenniumBC 166 vi Contents Textual Circulation and the Mechanics of Production SaraJ.Milstein 8 The“Magic”ofAdapa 191 MatthewT.Rutz 9 TheTextaftertheSacrifice DivinationReportsfromKassiteBabylonia 214 ChristianW.Hess 10 SongsofClay MaterialityandPoeticsinEarlyAkkadianEpic 251 JacobLauinger 11 Neo-AssyrianScribes,“Esarhaddon’sSuccessionTreaty,”andthe DynamicsofTextualMassProduction 285 Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger 1 Introduction Reassembling the Social from Texts and Contexts For those who read and study cuneiform texts as sources for reconstructing andunderstandingthehistoryandcultureofancientMesopotamia,thetextual record from this time and place frequently presents itself as a self-contained body of evidence, which, if examined and understood in its entirety, would reveal the answers to any questions that are asked of it within the limits of whatisrecordedinthesurvivingtexts.Althoughcuneiformtextsarerecorded on physical media such as clay tablets and stone monuments, scholars and otherinterestedreadersalmostalwaysinteractwiththeircontentthroughpho- tographsordrawingsoftheoriginalsources,orevenmoreindirectly,through transliterationsandtranslationsproducedbyotherswhohavestudiedthetexts before them. In all of these instances, the different means employed to repro- ducethesourcessharetheintentionofmakingtheircontentavailableforfur- ther study as accurately and accessibly as possible. Since most reproductions ofcuneiformssourcesareintendedforscholarsinterestedprimarily,ifnotex- clusively,intheircontent,anditisnotpossibletoreplicateallofthefeatures of a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space, let alone in tran- scription, the emphasis on reproducing the content of these sources is to a certain extent inevitable and unavoidable. But one of the unintended conse- quences of emphasizing content over the other aspects of the sources is that the content is presented as an abstraction that exists apart from the medium onwhichitappears.Theexposuretothecontentofcuneiformsourcesasdis- embodied abstractions is so deeply embedded in the experience of studying Mesopotamian texts that even when working directly with an actual tablet or monument, it is very difficult not to ignore everything else about the object itselfandtofocusinsteadsolelyontranscribingandinterpretingitscontent. While Assyriologists have long been aware of the importance of context forinterpreting cuneiformtexts,and itwouldbe difficulttofind astudyfrom the past thirty or forty years that does not address, in some form or another, thearchaeological,ifnotalsothehistorical,cultural,orpoliticalcontextofthe textual sources that are treated, the extent to which the content of a text is examined in isolation from its function as a material object has a subtle, but fundamental influence on the way the relationship between texts and their contexts is conceptualized. One of the most substantial effects of separating textsfromtheirphysicalinstantiationsisthatitdetachesthecontentofatext 2 PaulDelneroandJacobLauinger fromitsimmediatespatialandtemporalanchoringsothatitbecomesastatic, unchanging abstraction, which can be studied as a fixed and self-contained system of meaning, removed from the dynamics of the social world in which itwasproducedandcirculated.Sincefreezinglanguagesothatitisnolonger boundbytimeandspaceisoneoftheprimaryattributesofwritingasatech- nology,examiningtheverbalcontentofatextwithouttakingintoaccountthe multiplicity of meanings it might have had in the social context in which it wasoriginallyrecorded,uttered,orconceivedisjustifiable,particularlywhen the text was intended to be read by readers in different times and places. But veryfew,ifanyMesopotamiantextsarelikelytohavebeenproducedwiththe intentionoftranscendingthecircumscribedlocalandinstitutionalcontextsin which they were compiled. Moreover, with the exception of monumental and votiveinscriptionsaddressedtodeitiesorfuturerulers,itisunlikelythatmany cuneiformtextswereeverintendedtooutlivethefinitepurposeforwhichthey werewritten.However,whentextsareboundtospecificspatialandtemporal contexts,therelationshipbetweenthecontentofatextanditsaudienceisless stable than it would be for texts that were composed for an ideal audience of present and future readers who could be hoped to understand their meaning at any place or time. When understood as material objects with limited, but clearly defined spatial and temporal trajectories, the meaning of texts can be expectedtochangeastheymovethroughsocialspaceandthesignificanceof theircontentisconditionedandtransformedbythehandsthroughwhichthey pass and the different recipients who view and use them. In studying texts independently from their materiality and their movement through space and time, and examining their content instead as a fixed abstraction, a critical di- mensionoftheirmeaningandtheircontextislost. The papers in this volume were first presented in their initial form at a one-day symposium organized by the editors at Johns Hopkins University on November19,2013.Thegoalofthesymposium,andthearticlesinthisvolume which resulted from it, was to bring together specialists working on texts or textual corpora from different periods, genres, and areas of the cuneiform worldtoconsidertherelationshipbetweenMesopotamiantextsandtheircon- textsspecificallywithrespecttohowdifferenttypesofcuneiformtextsmoved and functioned as objects in social space. The purpose of asking the partici- pants to address the question of text and context from this perspective was two-fold: 1. Toprovide abroadarray oftext- orcorpora-specificstudies thatillustrate arangeofsocial,cultural,and/orhistoricalcontextsinwhichtextsofspe- cific types circulated and to show how these contexts may have condi- tionedandtransformedthemeaningofthetextsexaminedastheymoved throughspaceandtime. Introduction 3 2. To present different methodologies and sources of evidence that can be usedtoreconstructthecontextsinwhichthetextsinquestioncirculated, in order to provide a critical framework for determining how these texts functioned. Inkeepingwiththesetwogoals,allofthepaperspresentedatthesymposium, andthearticlesthatdevelopedoutofthemforthisvolume,addressthemove- mentandfunctionoftextsinsocialspacewithrespecttotextsofmanydiffer- enttypesandfromawiderangeofmethodologicalperspectives.Thetextsand periodscoveredbythesestudiescompriselate-secondmillenniumritualtexts from Emar (Daniel Fleming), Old Assyrian incantations from Kanesh (Gojko Barjamovic), early second millennium Sumerian laments (Paul Delnero), late- fourth millennium administrative texts from Uruk (Christopher Woods), Ur III administrativetextsfromsouthernMesopotamia(StevenGarfinkle),Neo-Baby- lonianadministrativetextsfromUruk(MichaelKozuh),OldBabylonianSume- rianliterarycompositionsfromMeturan(SaraMilstein),MiddleBabyloniandi- vinatoryreportsfromNippur(MatthewRutz),Akkadianepicsfromthesecond and first millennia (Christian Hess), and Neo-Assyrian treaties from the core and periphery of the Neo-Assyrian empire (Jacob Lauinger). Although the methodologies applied to this broad array of texts and textual corpora are di- verseandmulti-faceted,eachstudyemphasizesoneofthreemoregeneralap- proachestothedynamicrelationshipbetweentextsandcontextswithrespect totheirfunctionasmaterialobjectsthatmovethroughsocialspace: 1. Textualcirculationandperformance(Fleming,Barjamovic,andDelnero) 2. Textualcirculationandadministrativepraxis(Woods,Garfinkle,andKozuh) 3. Textualcirculationandthemechanicsofproduction(Milstein,Rutz,Hess, andLauinger) NumerousscholarshavetreatedthetopicofMesopotamiantextsandcontexts from a wide range of perspectives, resulting in studies that have yielded an abundanceofvaluableinsightsintothehistorical,cultural,andsocialcontexts in which cuneiform texts circulated. Many of these studies have focused on illuminatingoneobscuresideoftherelationshipbetweenthecontentoftexts and their contexts by focusing on the other. That is, context creates a frame- work for (re)approaching a text’s content, or content provides the means for (re)constructingatext’scontext(historical,cultural,social,orotherwise).Still other studies self-consciously place content and context in a dialectical rela- tionship. In the following section, we briefly summarize selected examples of thesethreemethodologies–contenttocontext,contentfromcontext,content andcontext–toillustratehow,explicitlyorimplicitly,thecontributionstothis

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