The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Takayoshi Oshima —
34 Only two so-called Shuila prayers to Enlil are known so far, see Mayer 1976: 384–385. Note
also that only one short prayer to Enlil, engraved on a cylinder seal, is attested so far. See
above.
35 Cf. Herodotus, I 183.
36 The earliest documentation of Esagila is the date formula of the year 10 of Sabium, Horsnell
1999: 70–71. For a short discussion of restoration and rebuilding of Esagila, see George 1993:
139–140, no. 967.
37 They also found a wall ten metres high.
38 George 1993: 156, no. 1176.
39 Langdon 1912: 126–127, col. iii, 8–10.
40 For the attitude of the ancient Babylonians to the statues of the deities, see Oppenheim 1977:
183–198. For the removal of the statue of Marduk, see above. A god also could leave his statue
when the statue lost his divine glory or was totally destroyed. In such cases, the statue was
repaired or remade if it was substantially damaged through a series of careful rituals. See
Walker and Dick 2001: 6.
41 For a recent translation and references, see Foster 2005: 880–911.
42 See W.G. Lambert, ‘Processions to the Akitu House’, Révue d’Assyriologie 91 (1997), pp. 75–77,
lines 1–7.
43 Cohen 1993: 439. See also Linssen 2004: 83–86.
44 For instance, The Akitu Chronicle records the interruptions of the Akitu festival by solely
repeating the sentence ‘Nabu did not come from Borsippa for the procession of Bel (and) Bel
did not come out’. See Grayson 1975: 35–36 and passim. Note that The Nabonidus Chronicle
also records the interruptions of the Akitu festival by the same sentence, see Grayson, ibid.,
p. 21 and passim. Interestingly, ther is no reference to the recitation of Enuma Elish in attested
chronicles. Commonly the phraseology ‘He (the Babylonian king) took the hand of Bel’ marked
the observance of the Akitu festival throughout the Chronicles, see Grayson 1970: 169.
45 Pongratz-Leisten 1994: 258–259, 14–35.
46 Grayson 1970: 169.
47 Cf. George 1992: 390.
48 Herodotus reports a yearly festival of Babylon wherein the Chaldeans offer ‘a thousand talents’
weight of frankincense’, Herodotus, 183.
49 Pliny from the mid-first century wrote, ‘The temple of Jupiter Belus in Babylon is still standing
. . . but in all other respects the place has gone back to a desert’ (Pliny, Natural History, VI
121).
50 Babylonian Talmud, Abodah Zarah, 11b. See, S. Dalley, ‘Bel at Palmyra and Elsewhere in the
Parthian Period’, ARAM 7 (1995), p. 143.
51 For instance, in 115 AD, when Trajan entered Babylon during the campaign against the
Parthians, he found nothing but ruins in the former glorious city. He did not offer a sacrifice
to Marduk like other kings who had entered Babylon, but to Alexander the Great who died
in Babylon 400 years earlier. Dio Cassius 30.1).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abusch,T. 1995 ‘Marduk’, in K. van der Troon, B. Becking, and P.W. van der Horst (eds),
Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd edn, Brill, Leiden, Boston, and Cologne,
1014–1026.
Alberti, A. 1985 ‘A Reconstruction of the Abū Sˇ abīkh God-List’, Studi epigrafici e linguistici, 2,
pp. 3–23.
Bidmead, J. 2002 The Akītu Festival: Religious Continuity and Royal Legitimation in Mesopotamia,
Gorgias Press, Piscataway.
Biggs, R.D. 1974 Inscriptions from Tell Abū S.alabīkh (OIP 99), The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
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