#kassite

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Neither they nor the Kassites of western Iran, the Hittites of Anatolia,* the Hyksos of modern Israel and Jordan, and the Mycenaeans of Greece were as organized as Egypt or the Mesopotamian city of Babylon, but for a while that did not matter, because chariots gave these formerly peripheral peoples such an edge in war-making that they could plunder or even take over their older, richer neighbors.

*Ancient historians generally call the land that is now Turkey by the Greek name Anatolia (meaning "Land of the East"), since the Turks – who originally came from central Asia – settled Anatolia only in the eleventh century CE.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[luutakiituri]

Palliserenaadi

[evolutionsbedingt]

This article¹ is the most likely source for the Egypt and Mesopotamia claim. The wiki entry @sumerianlanguage linked does mention the beads came from both regions, it just dedicates a lot more space to the Egyptian connection.

And it also probably misunderstood a secondary publication, assuming that the 23 studied beads were all from this bracelet, when in fact they were samples from graves across Denmark and northern Germany. Most of these beads did come from Mesopotamia – only two (found in Ølby and in Hesselager respectively) were made of Egyptian glass, possibly in Amarna.

Of the Kongehøj bracelet only one bead was analysed and it fit the Mesopotamian glass composition. So it can be assumed that all beads of that bracelet were made in Mesopotamia.

¹ J. Varberg, B. Gratuze, F. Kaul, Between Egypt, Mesopotamia and Scandinavia: Late Bronze Age glass beads found in Denmark. Journal of Archaeological Science, 64, 2015, 168–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.11.036 (15th August 2024).

Blue glass beads from the Late Bronze Age, found in 1885 when a Danish farmer ploughed up a cremation urn at Kongehøj. Made in Mesopotamia approximately 3,100 years ago, they offer evidence of long-distance trade connections in the prehistoric world.

image from here

[kattiperkele]

Mammuttimarkkinat ja kaikki viisi bussimatkustajaa istuu vessa- ja talouspaperirullien kanssa.

[bronzegods]

Siege of Aleppo comic script snippet

A brief view of Ninurta’s perspective regarding his adoption into the Assyrian pantheon (becomes quite relevant at the end of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age - the Assyrian kings really like him!) and his experience in Kassite Babylon.

Adad is more ride or die for Assur, but they’ve also known each other since the Assyrian trading colony period.

[spiritsdancinginthenight]

Bronze nipple-footed beaker (situla); beaker has a cylindrical body tapering to a nipple base rendered as the centre of a chased rosette with 16 petals with rounded tips. Middle Babylonian, 10th century B.C. British Museum. 130905

[sheikahwarriork]

nobody will understand this but: FUCK YOU CUSAS 30 by van soldt

[whencyclopedia]

Although climate change has today become a much bigger and more globalized problem than in the past, ancient peoples did have to contend with local events that severely disrupted or even ended their way of life as they knew it. A long series of droughts in parts of the Americas led to the abandonment of such cities as Cahuachi in Peru and may have contributed to the collapse of the Maya civilization in Mesoamerica while similar climatic changes in southern Africa likely contributed to the demise of Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. Another notable catastrophe was the Bronze Age Collapse, which had devastating consequences: Climate change, combined with other stressors, brought down the Hittite Empire, the Mycenaean Civilization, Kassite Babylonia and many other states, ushering in a dark age around the Mediterranean. There were, too, the more explosive events that brought total disaster in a matter of hours such as the great floods that are told in so many myths around the world and which archaeology has revealed often have a basis in fact. There were devastating earthquakes such as the one that brought down the walls of Jericho or toppled the Colossus of Rhodes, and the explosions of the volcanoes on Thera and at Pompeii that killed thousands in a moment. All of these events, often exacerbated by overpopulation, overworking the soil, and heavy deforestation of a specific area meant that competition for power and resources became intense as agriculture was disrupted and leaders were challenged. Sometimes, even entire cities and states succumbed. In this collection, we examine these dramatic events and their lasting consequences. Cahuachi was abandoned from the mid-6th century CE, perhaps due to climate change as the local environment became more arid. Earthquakes, too, may have been a contributing factor to the centre's decline. It is interesting to note that the number of geoglyphs created at this time increased, perhaps indicating the urgent need for divine help to meet the crisis. The mounds were systematically covered with earth and so the abandonment of Cahuachi was both planned and deliberate. We also have a free lesson plan for teachers on this subject.

[kata4a]

so since attested akkadian texts span a period of almost three millenia (!), there's naturally quite a bit of dialectical variation both geographically ("assyrian" in the north, "babylonian" in the south), and diachronically (e.g., "old," "middle," and "late" babylonian)

but my favorite detail so far, per huehnergard:

Already during the Kassite period [when Middle Babylonian was spoken] Old Babylonian had come to be regarded as the classical period of Akkadian language and literature, and scribes in both Babylonia and Assyria attempted to duplicate it in a purely literary (i.e., unspoken) dialect that Assyriologists call Standard Babylonian (SB). The scribes' efforts to reproduce the classical language usually had mixed results, as their own language patterns frequently intruded. Standard Babylonian is the dialect in which such important works as Enūma eliš and the later, longer version of Gilgamesh are written, indeed, all of the literary texts of the late second and the first millenia, as well as many royal inscriptions.

badly aping archaic language to tell your myths is apparently about as old as mythology itself

[thatshowthingstarted]

 Babylonian Map of the World, 8th or 7th Century B.C.

The Babylonian Map of the World (also Imago Mundi or Mappa mundi) is a Babylonian clay tablet with a schematic world map and two inscriptions written in the Akkadian language. It includes a brief and partially lost textual description.

The tablet describes the oldest known depiction of the known world. Ever since its discovery there has been controversy on its general interpretation and specific features. Another pictorial fragment, VAT 12772, presents a similar topography from roughly two millennia earlier.

The map is centered on the Euphrates, flowing from the north (top) to the south (bottom), with its mouth labelled "swamp" and "outflow". The city of Babylon is shown on the Euphrates, in the northern half of the map. Susa, the capital of Elam, is shown to the south, Urartu to the northeast, and Habban, the capital of the Kassites, is shown (incorrectly) to the northwest. Mesopotamia is surrounded by a circular "bitter river" or Ocean, and seven or eight foreign regions are depicted as triangular sections beyond the Ocean, perhaps imagined as mountains.

The tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at Sippar, Baghdad vilayet, some 60 km north of Babylon on the east bank of the Euphrates River. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1882 (BM 92687); the text was first translated in 1889. The tablet is usually thought to have originated in Borsippa. In 1995, a new section of the tablet was discovered, at the point of the upper-most triangle.

Clay, Height: 12.2 cm (4.8 in), Width: 8.2 cm (3.2 in)

Courtesy: British Museum

[urban-industrial-aesthetic]

Babylonian Clay Map / Kassite Period, 1550-1450 BCE.

[marigold-hills]

Dunes & Waters, part 29

PART 1 • PREVIOUS PART • NEXT PART

Things shift once they get back to Aswan.

Sirius stretches, and Remus remembers how he woke up in the night to their legs tangled together, knees touching knees, ankles crossed over each other.

Sirius scratches his fingers over his neck, absentmindedly, and Remus remembers how it looked when he transformed from Padfoot with the collar still on it.

Sirius speaks of the Museum and Remus thinks not of the progress they made but of the guard, and of the dog, and he’s scared of the next person he comes across because he wants to rip someone’s throat out.

Sirius does anything, anything, and Remus watches. Catalogues the way he would untranslated texts, each new movement a hieroglyph to be studied. Each word a rite or an incantation - something fleeting and spoken into the wind and Remus wants to be greedy and preserve it all.

Thinks of the morning they woke up together – Remus first, the light bright through the open window falling across Sirius’ features. How it felt watching it, sacred and sacrilegious, and how the sun touching Sirius was an opening and Remus thought Horus has opened your mouth for you, and your eyes.

But Sirius doesn’t notice any of this. He’s too excited with the new puzzle he’s found, a key to the Box he didn’t have before. Studies his notes late into the evenings, takes them to the hotel when Remus insists they finish for the day.

Sirius reads about Khonsu, says “I wouldn’t have figured it out if not for the statue, I don’t think, but it makes sense the moon would have been involved here.”

It’s two days to the full moon when they finally crack it.

It’s painstaking but Remus translates the scroll. Symbol by symbol, the story comes out.

I have made this for you to keep until you are ready, it reads, and to keep from others who would do you harm.

Speak to the deities who look upon your kind

Wolf-kind; of men with bodies of beasts

Beloved of my heart, speak to them and open what I have saved for you to keep

Speak to the four corners.

To the stars and to the moon, to your body and to your death and those who bring you to it.

To anyone encroaching here, heed this warning:

To lay in someone else’s grave is to die their death

To read words in someone else’s tongue is to take their fate

“Rites it is, then,” Sirius says, reaching for books on ceremonies.

Remus writes out notes he has on each of the lines of text. “I don’t know any rites to the UR.IDIM.”

“There must be something, there’s worship of it all the way back to the Kassite period.”

Sirius throws his legs onto the desk, balances on his chair the way he does when he’s deeply in thought, like battling gravity helps the process along.

“Make sure you don’t read any of them aloud.”

Sirius looks at him, confused.

“The warning. I never heard of lycanthropy being transmitted via spoken word, but let’s try not to test the theory today.”

“Why, Professor, don’t want to put a little wolf in me?” Sirius winks and grins and the whole display is just…

Remus chokes on his tongue.

NEXT PART

@tealeavesandtrash

@moon-girl88

@hoje--aqui

@cocoabutterandbooks

@onion-sliced-apples

@prancingpony42

@digital-kam

@remoonysiriusly

@sweetstarryskies

@a-sunset-outside-my-window

@procrastinatingstuff

@annaliza999

@arasael

(let me know if you do/don’t want to be tagged!)

[yamayuandadu]

What do you mean by an ishtar type goddess

I’ve picked this term up from Gary Beckman’s late 1990s articles Ištar of Nineveh Reconsidered and The Goddess Pirinkir and Her Ritual from Hattusa (CTH 644). In both of them he makes a point that across the “cuneiform world” (so, in modern terms roughly from the middle of Turkey to the west of Iran) multiple deities could be designated by the same logogram - IŠTAR, to be specific - and that this broadly reflects all of them having certain shared features , and indicates the existence of a category encompassing all of them in the imagination of ancient theologians. At the same time, he stresses that each of such deities will also have unique features which become evident when enough sources become available. He demonstrated it on examples like Shaushka, Pinikir and the Kizzuwatnean “goddess of the night” (the correct reading of her own name remains unknown). As far as I know Beckman was more or less the first to advance views like that equally successfully, but other studies using a similar methodology soon followed. For example Barbara Nevling Porter has managed to prove in the early 2000s that it is safe to say there are multiple fully distinct goddesses named Ishtar in Neo-Assyrian sources, and that they could even be portrayed interacting with each other (see her Ishtar of Nineveh and Her Collaborator, Ishtar of Arbela, in the Reign of Assurbanipal for more details).

These views are fairly mainstream today, though popular understanding very clearly lags behind. Tonia Sharlach in her excellent Ox of One’s Own. Royal Wives and Religion at the Court of the Third Dynasty of Ur (a fantastic book even if you’re not very interested in Mesopotamia) calls the names Inanna and Ishtar “umbrella terms” (p. 269). Spencer L. Allen dedicated an entire monograph to the phenomenon of one name often designating multiple functionally fully separate deities, The Splintered Divine. A Study of Ištar, Baal, and Yahweh. Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East. There are numerous other examples, but these are what I’d consider the best introduction. The classification of (some) deities as exemplars of bigger “types” is not limited to Ishtar(s) and is overall fairly standard in Assyriology, see ex. the discussion here, pp. 298-299. The precedents for this sort of systematization are quite common in primary sources. We know that the scribes employed by the Ur III court essentially saw Ninisina as a “type” since despite the two being distinct, Gula could be referred to as “Ninisina of Umma” by them. God lists will sometimes have entries like “Enlil of Subartu” or “the Kassite Adad” and so on. “Type” is just the term I’m used to because Beckman was my introduction to this idea but I’ve also seen phrases like  “Nergal figure”, “lesser Nergal” etc. employed by Frans Wiggermann, for instance.

[meret118]

around 530 BCE, princess and priestess Ennigaldi-Nanna of the Neo-Babylonian empire curated the world's first known public museum.

Situated in Ur, or modern-day Dhi Qar Governorate of Iraq, this museum contained artifacts belonging to Southern Mesopotamia. Many of the pieces that were exhibited were actually excavated by Ennigaldi-Nanna's father, King Nabonidus, or collected by the former King Nebuchadnezzar. Ennigaldi-Nanna helped organize all of these objects to inform and share the history of the empire.

Born sometime before 547 BCE, Ennigaldi-Nanna was the daughter of King Nabonidus, ruler of the Neo-Babylonian empire. Her name means “Nanna requests an entu” and was likely given to her after she assumed the role of entu, or high priestess, of Ur. She was the first entu in six centuries and held significant importance in Ur.

While most of her duties revolved around serving as a “human wife” to the moon god Sin, she also oversaw a school for priestesses and managed part of the temple complex of Ur.

. . .

This museum contained artifacts excavated by Nabonidus and some that were collected by Nebuchadnezzar II. They included a ceremonial mace head, a Kassite boundary marker called a kudurru, and part of a statue of the Sumerian king Shulgi, among many other objects, the oldest of which dated to around the 20th century BCE. Ennigaldi-Nanna was believed to have curated all of the artifacts and assigned labels to the collections. In fact, these ancient “museum labels” were inscribed onto clay cylinders in three different languages, one of which was Sumerian. There was even an early form of museum catalogs that were inscribed on tablets.

More at the link.

[valarhalla]

Ze End of Ze Bronze Age

Hokay. So here’s the Near East. Just chilling. Dayumn, that is a nice Near East you might say. WRONG. Ruling out the Persian Gulf sinking, earthquakes and solar eclipses, Egypt’s brief fling with monotheism killing the gods, and the invention of iron smelting, we're definitely going to blow ourselves up. hOKAY. So Basically, we’ve got the Mycenaeans, the Kassites, the Assyrian Empire, the Hittites, the Egyptian New Kingdom, Ugarit, Canaan, the Sea-Peoples, the Amorites, the Luwians, and Us (the Babylonians). With Bronze. Ok so one day the Sea-Peoples are like “those Egyptian sons of a bitches are goin’ down.” So they launch themselves at Egypt. While it’s on the way Ramses II is like “SHIT SHIT WHO THE FUCK IS INVADING US. Oh well. Fire arrows!” Canaan is like “shit guyz’ … Ze sea peoplez are coming! Fire arrows!” “But I’m v’tired!” “Oh well have a nap… BUT ZEN, FIRE ZE ARROWS!” The Indus Valley is like “WTF mates?” The Assyrians, Ugarit and the Amorites launch THEIR shit, so now we’ve got arrows literally passing each other in mid-air (‘Yo. ‘Sup). Hittites are like AAAAAAH HANNAHANNA! “The Myceneaans are like “‘bout that time eh chaps? Right oh!” The Assyrians are like “fuck we’re dumbasses.” The Luwians are like “what’s going on, eh?” The Indus Valley is still like “WTF mate?” Mars is laughing at us, and some huge meteor’s like “well, fuck that”. So, now there's a dark ages, (Yes!!) and everyone's dead.... (...No, wait) Except the Indus Valley.... And they're still like, WTF?  But they'll be indecipherable soon. Fucking indus script…Buuuuut! Asuming we don't blow ourselves up, us Mesopotamians have to work our way of breaking off the continent (bypass DOOM) to go and hang with the Land of Magan....

The Indus valley can come too.

ZE END.

[bronzegods]

Marduk and Assur - Babylon and Assyria

Marduk and Assur are two Mesopotamian deities tied closely to their respective cities - Marduk with the city of Babylon and Assur with the city of Assur. In Pantheon, their destinies have been linked from early on, with their origins beginning in the Sumerian period…

The two deities are brothers, born at roughly the same time and sired by Enki, the famous god of the subterranean waters. Marduk, then named Asalluhe, was his child by Damkina, his wife, and therefore was more legitimate than Assur. Assur’s mother was an Amorite goddess that Enki was fooling around with, and given that Amorites were poorly looked upon by the Sumerians in this time period, Enki tried his damned hardest to conceal knowledge of said fooling around. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to hide a godling baby that looks like you and has your family’s distinctive winged deity appearance, so he was left with a child that was for all intents and purposes unwanted.

Asalluhe and Assur grew up with disparate lives. Enki, not exactly known for his parenting skills, shoved his young sons off on other deities to raise them. In Asalluhe’s case, Utu the sun god was given the responsibility to raise one child. Dumuzi was given the responsibility to raise Assur.

Unfortunately, with Dumuzi’s proximity to Inanna, that didn’t bode well for Assur. While Asalluhe adored his “Uncle Utu” and changed his name to Marduk (calf of the sun) in appreciation, Assur moved away from the south as quickly as possible and returned to the outcrop of rock he’d been born at. The city of Assur formed around him, and as far as he was concerned, he was more than happy to stay far away from the south and all the bad memories it held.

As the climate changed, the southern Sumerian city-states dried up and Babylon came into power. With it, Marduk raised to power, finding himself beloved by the Amorite conquerors who took over Babylon. Marduk enjoyed kingship and power… until the gods of Hatti sacked Babylon and left him shattered. Damn Hittites didn’t even bother sticking around; the Kassite gods soon moved in and subjugated Marduk under their feet.

Assur fared hardly better. He built an impressive trade network, but his city fell into the control of the Akkadian Empire, the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia (Shamshi-Adad’s empire), and the Mitanni Empire. Only at the tail end of the Bronze Age did Assur start to regain his independence, enough to start challenging Hatti, Mitanni, and (Kassite) Babylon.

The Iron Age, though, is when the two really start to clash…

Illustrations commissioned from Eaglidots