Edition of the lexical cuneiform texts from the so-called House of the Incantation Priest in Ashur, which are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan M. Maul
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508645095

During the excavations of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in Assur at the beginning of the 20th century, a comprehensive clay tablet collection was discovered. It contained the working materials of a healer dynasty that was influential in the late Assyrian Empire. These working materials also include lexical texts, which played an important role in the academic teaching of the healers in the 7th century B.C.E. The Assyrian healers were in the service of their king and had to see to his well-being when he was in the city of Assur. Without any doubt these healers were among the greatest scholars of their time. Hence it is hardly surprising that King Assurbanipal commissioned the healer Kiṣir–Aššur to create a set of clay tablets for the palace library of Nineveh with the most important lexical work of the epoch (the sequence of tablets comprising 24 tablets, called ur5-ra = ḫubullu). In 1979, in the previously unexcavated areas of the healers' library, Iraqi archaeologists discovered most of the collection of lexical texts that the healers had compiled in their library. Most of them belong to the sequence of the tablet series called ur5-ra = ḫubullu and are likely to represent the tradition of ur5-ra = ḫubullu that Kiṣir–Aššur had offered to the palace library of Nineveh. The as yet unpublished texts contain numerous previously unknown passages of the work.In the research project applied for here, all previously unpublished lexical cuneiform texts from the healers' library are to be presented in scholarly editions and their cultural-historical significance will be acknowledged. 14 of the tablets to be edited, with a total of 1615 lines, are in the Baghdad Iraq Museum and come from the find made in 1979. 4 other unpublished texts with a total of 110 lines are kept in the State Museums of Istanbul.The edition to be created will be presented as a monograph and, after compliance with the moving wall, three years later as an open access publication that allows a full-text search. When it is placed online, the sustainability of which is ensured, the digital version of the publication is linked to the photographs used for the edition, so that the underlying research materials can be called up with the text editions and the research results presented can be checked at any time without great effort.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants