Cuneiform Digital Library Notes 2014:19 « ‹ ♦ › » A note on the colophon of VAT 9487 Klaus Wagensonner < klaus.wagensonner@orinst.ox.ac.uk > University of Oxford In my article “A Scribal Family and its Orthographic Peculiarities” in 2011 I discussed texts from Middle Assyrian Assur, which belong to a corpus written by the sons of the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu. Thanks to the extant colophons at our disposal we have a rather good grasp of the scribal activity of these scribes. However, due to the state of preservation and the dissemination of parts of the material already in antiquity, future palaeographical studies will most likely reveal more examples belonging to this corpus. (One example, which appears to belong to the corpus copied by the members of this family is a fragment kept in the archaeological collection of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, which, though lacking a preserved colophon, resembles many features of similar tablets in this group.) Although written by “young scribes” (ṭupšarrū ṣeḫrūtu), these texts do not offer many clues about scribal education of some sort, which we can presume most likely happened within the (private) realm of scribes such as Ninurta-uballissu. Putting orthographical peculiarities and other variations aside, there are hardly any significant errors or erasures in the pertinent texts. Unfortunately we lack any archival information on those scribes which would shed some light onto their lives. The three brothers Marduk-balāssu-ereš, Bēl-aḫa-iddina and Sîn-šuma-iddina copied a great deal of lexical and literary material, all of which has come down to us in bilingual form. Most of these (quite well-preserved) texts represent our earliest sources for Akkadian translations of Sumerian literary compositions such as “Ninurta’s Exploits” or “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” but go back to earlier (bilingual) Middle Babylonian sources, for which evidence is rather scarce (see, for instance, CBS 11153 (+) N 6286). The majority of lexical sources known from Assur and dating to the last centuries of the 2 millennium BC already shows signs of “canonization.” A closer glance, however, reveals some differences, as does the text, whose colophon shall be discussed in greater detail below. The small fragment VAT 9487 originates from the lower left corner of a large tablet with probably either two (see the copy of the second tablet of Diri by Bēl-aḫa-iddina; Ass. 2559; see also Wagensonner 2011: 672, 2.1.2) or three columns per side (see the hand-copy in Wagensonner 2011: 700 and compare to VAT 10172 for a better preserved manuscript of the first tablet of the series Ea with three columns on each side; hand-copy in Wagensonner 2014: 476-477). The copy contains the third tablet of the series Diri, a supplemental sign syllabary, which provides readings and translations of Sumerian compound logograms. By the Middle Assyrian period the sequence of entries and the division into “tablets” already follow the later conventions. It is a “0-1-2-4”-type list (“0” representing the vertical wedge or entry marker; “1” the syllabically written reading of a (compound) logogram; “2” the (compound) logogram; “4” the Akkadian equivalent). Later copies of the 1 millennium BC add a column “3” containing an analytical writing of the (compound) logogram, traces of which are visible in the copy of the 1 tablet of nd st st General Links Archive CDLN 2014:19 http://cdli.ucla.edu/Pubs/cdln/php/single.php?id=000046 1 of 4 22/09/2014 23:36