Colloque - Archives paléo-babyloniennes : 140 ans de publications et d'études (1882-2022) : Some Old Babylonian Archives in Context: Tell aḍ-Ḍibāʿī (Zaralulu) and Šaduppûm (Tell Ḥarmal)

Civilisation mésopotamienne

Dominique Charpin

Collège de France

Année 2022-2023

Colloque - Archives paléo-babyloniennes : 140 ans de publications et d'études (1882-2022) : Some Old Babylonian Archives in Context: Tell aḍ-Ḍibāʿī (Zaralulu) and Šaduppûm (Tell Ḥarmal)

Intervenant(s)

Laith M. Hussein, State Board of Antiquity and Heritage, Bagdad

The excavations at Šaduppûm prove that the ancient Babylonian city was surrounded by a wall and had an administrative building, a main temple and other small temples, private residences and workshops. Šaduppûm is considered to be the administrative center of a governorate of the state of Ešnunna. To date, only a third of the 3,000 tablets discovered have been published and edited.

Various publications show that Šaduppûm was an agricultural society because of the large quantities of grain, names of fields and fields, cultivated plots of land, storage facilities and the construction of irrigated soil.

The texts from Šaduppûm also contain a number of school texts. Lexical texts contain lists of various objects (such as types of wood and trees, green plants, vessels, birds, wool or clothing), syllable alphabets, lists of gods and lists of personal names.

Between the several archaeological sites in the vicinity in the Diyāla-Area near the center of the capital Baghdad is the small ruined city Uzarlulu (modern: Tell aḍ-Ḍibāʿī ), 2,5 km away northeast from the place Šaduppûm (modern: Tell Ḥarmal). More than 68 years after the start of the guided Iraqi excavation in Uzarlulu, a large number of finds, especially the clay tablets, have still not been published and the results of the excavation have been partially published to this day. Despite several publications, the clay tablets remained less known and are still largely unpublished today. The present study is the first attempt to record all clay tablets and small finds from Uzarlulu worked on by the Iraqi colleagues, to identify them as far as possible and to assign them to the original archives.