Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 2022; aop Abhandlung Alexander Johannes Edmonds* and Petra M. Creamer* More to Tell About Billa! Asimānum/Šimānum and the Early and Middle Bronze Ages at Baˁšīqā, Iraq https://doi.org/10.1515/za-2022-0011 Abstract: Despite being one of the most prominent and best-documented northern client states of the Ur III state, the city of Asimānum/Šimānum remained unlocalized. Here, we demonstrate through both historical-geographical and philo- logical argumentation and archaeological evidence that it must correspond to later Middle and Neo-Assyrian Šibaniba, modern Tell Billa, northern Iraq. Building upon this finding, we propose a new history of Tell Billa during the Early and Middle Bronze Age. Introduction The site of Tell Billa (more properly Tall Billā in Arabic), near modern Baˁšīqā, Iraq, is best known for its Middle and Neo-Assyrian (MA and NA) occupation layers, from which a sizeable textual corpus emerged during the exca- vations of Speiser in the 1930’s.1 This, in turn has permit- ted Billa’s identification as MA Šib/manibe (and NA Šib- aniba).2 Yet, the expedition’s (unfortunately only scantily published) archaeological findings indicate that this large mound was already occupied from the Late Chalcolithic (LC) period onwards, which poses the question as to the site’s identity in cuneiform sources prior to the Middle Assyrian period. 1 This paper’s abbreviations follow those in the RlA, and both mod- ern and ancient names are generally reproduced according to the guidelines of the TAVO series, with the exception of some well-en- trenched coinages, e. g. Nineveh or Khabur Ware. We are grateful to Walther Sallaberger and two anonymous reviewers for their com- ments and suggestions. 2 This was already astutely suggested by Forrer a decade before the Pennsylvania excavations: “Diese Strasse ist heute der Weg von Moṣul nach Bâ-Hešîqe, und man geht kaum fehl, wenn man den in der Nähe gelegenen grösseren Tell Billa für Šibaniba hält.” (Forrer 1920, 35). In turn, recent advances in the understanding of the historical geography of northern Iraq, most prominently the identification of the site of Bassetki (Arabic: Bāsitka) with MA Mardamā(n)3 (earlier Maridabān; Pfälzner/Faist 2020), have raised once more the question of the localiza- tion of the important Ur III-period city of Šimānum (also frequently attested as Simānum, Ašimānum, and Asimā- num), very likely to be equated with the Sargonic-era (OAkk) city of Asimānum. Here, we contend that an identification of Asimānum/ Šimānum with later Šibaniba, modern Tell Billa, simulta- neously resolves both issues, providing the archaeological evidence prior to the Middle Assyrian period at Billa with a historical context, and the Early Bronze Age (EBA) his- torical city a suitable archaeological site. This paper first presents a historical-geographical assessment of the data and an argument for its localization at Billa, before pre- senting pertinent surviving archaeological evidence from the tell. The final part of the paper provides a proposed new history of Tell Billa and the surrounding region from the Early to Middle Bronze Age (MBA) in light of these find- ings. 3 We normalize this toponym in Akkadian as Mardamān/Maridabān (Groneberg 1980, 160), as the b/m reflects the Hurrian genitive -we, and the morphologically analogous Mitanni toponym Uḫušmān is spelled ù-ḫu-uš-ma-a-ni in KBo 1, 3 r. 40ʹ (del Monte/Tischler 1978, 450). *Corresponding authors: Alexander Johannes Edmonds, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, Jilin Province, People's Republic of China; Email: alexander-johannes.edmonds@uni-tuebingen.de Petra M. Creamer, Emory University; Email: petra.maria.creamer@emory.edu Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.