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On a Recently Published River Ordeal Instruction from Mari on the Euphrates (Late 19th Century BC)
P. 242–256.
Ancient Mesopotamia is considered to be the birthplace of the river ordeal. Across millennia, the town of Hit on the Middle Euphrates was the centre of this ritual, used for establishing truth by divine intervention both in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. Mesopotamian river ordeals were documented by a variety of textual genres, including instructions for the participants of the ritual. An important cuneiform document of this kind, excavated in the ancient Syrian city of Mari (Tell Hariri) in 2002, was recently published by Cavigneaux with French translation. The text, which describes the settling of a lawsuit on a land property by means of an ordeal, is written in the little-documented Šakkanakku dialect of Akkadian and presents a considerable challenge both for philologists and legal historians. The present study offers a new interpretation of several difficult passages and the first English translation of this remarkable piece of evidence dating to the late 19th century BC.
Keywords: Ancient Near East
Publication based on the results of:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2026.
This collection of papers explores the epic traditions of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, bringing together insights from remarkable scholars. Topics range from the cuneiform epic of Erra to Homeric epics and Greco-Roman literature, shedding light on the role of epic texts in shaping collective identities and understanding ancient societies. The validity of ...
Added: September 28, 2026
Arkhipov I., Клыгина Ю. А., Широкова М. А., Вестник древней истории 2026 Т. 86 № 1 С. 216–259
Первый русский перевод ARET 13 1, одного из наиболее пространных и необычных документов из Эблы (Сирия, XXIV в. до н.э.) с подробным историко-филологическим комментарием. Главными героям произведения являются правитель Эблы, не названный по имени, и царь соседнего государства Мари по имени Хинна-Даган. Царь и Хинна-Даган посещают дом божеств, обозначенных как Отец и Мать Богов, чтобы спросить ...
Added: August 11, 2026
Arkhipov I., Kogan L., Journal of Cuneiform Studies 2026 Vol. 78 P. 3–25
Until recently, Assyriologists have been mostly unaware of the existence of prescriptive cuneiform law as early as in the Early Dynastic period. A deeper inquiry into the so-called chancery texts from Ebla has allowed Massimo Maiocchi and the present authors to independently conclude that compendia of prescriptive legal provisions, in their typology broadly identical to ...
Added: July 12, 2026
Arkhipov I., , in: Archives paléo-babyloniennes : 150 ans de publications et d’études (1872-2022).: P.: SEPOA, 2026. P. 387–406.
Added: May 12, 2026
Alexandrov B., Multidisciplinary research in archaeology 2025 No. 2 P. 125–148
This article surveys the political organization of Bronze Age Middle Euphrates states, focusing on Emar (Tell Meskene). It analyzes the scholarly debate about the city’s unique, non-linear political evolution. Third-millennium sources attest to rulers with the title EN (“lord”), yet 18th-century B.C. texts reveal a complete absence of kingship, with authority vested in communal assemblies ...
Added: March 1, 2026
Alexandrov B., Social Evolution & History 2025 Vol. 24 No. 2 P. 168–173
The article surveys the major approaches towards the typological features of the Middle Euphrates states of the Bronze Age ...
Added: March 1, 2026
Arkhipov I., Kogan L., Studia Eblaitica 2025 Vol. 11 P. 65–88
During the past five years, the authors of the present study have been intensely occupied with grammar, lexicon and contents of the Eblaite “chancery texts” – a highly informative, yet seriously underinvestigated group of thematically heterogeneous compositions published as part of ARET 13, 16 and 18. The present article is the second in a series ...
Added: November 27, 2025
Arkhipov I., Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires 2025 No. 3 P. 98–99
Added: November 3, 2025
Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2025.
This volume presents contributions in honour of Askold Ivantchik on his sixtieth birthday. Since his main academic interest lies in the Black Sea region in ancient times inhabited by diverse cultural groups who also had frequent contacts with people from far beyond, we collected articles on this topic. The volume presents papers analyzing different kinds ...
Added: October 6, 2025
Arkhipov I., Bennett E., George A. R. et al., Muenster: Zaphon, 2025.
This volume continues the task of publishing the Schøyen Collection’s Old Babylonian archival documents, already begun with two volumes of letters and one volume of school texts. The last few letters—ten late Old Babylonian exemplars mainly from Dūr-Abiešuḫ—are included here alongside twelve other documents from archives deriving from the same site. These add materially to ...
Added: July 24, 2025
Arkhipov I., Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale 2024 Vol. 118 P. 182–185
Added: March 12, 2025
Arkhipov I., Charpin D., Gaubert C. et al., Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale 2024 Vol. 118 No. 1 P. 91–102
The ARCHIBAB database (www.archibab.fr) now contains over the half of published Old Babylonian archival documents, which amounts to almost 16,000 cuneiform tablets in lemmatized transliteration, or c. 600,000 word tokens. Search tools of the database provide instant access to all mentions of a given word, via a glossary consisting of almost 5,000 lexemes, dozens of ...
Added: March 12, 2025
Arkhipov I., George A. R., Dresden: ISLET-Verlag, 2023.
This volume presents 170 more Old Babylonian letters now in the Schøyen Collection. None has been published in print before. Each letter is transliterated and translated, with appropriate annotations. Full indexes of proper nouns and a selective index of Akkadian vocabulary are appended. The volume is concluded with full documentation of the cuneiform on 168 ...
Added: February 4, 2024
Arkhipov I., Kogan L., Orientalia (Italy) 2024 Vol. 93 No. 2 P. 253–302
The text we study here was first published by D.O. Edzard in 1981. A new edition, by A. Catagnoti and P. Fronzaroli, was included in the second volume of the testi di cancelleria (2010) as ARET 16, 27.
The general import of the document has been correctly seen by the editors. Its main object is property ...
Added: November 5, 2023
Arkhipov I., Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires 2023 No. 3 P. 121–122
Added: October 23, 2023
Arkhipov I., Успенский А.Ф., Вестник древней истории 2023 Т. 83 № 3 С. 725–754
Среди литературных произведений, найденных при раскопках города Мари (Телль-Харири) в восточной Сирии, особое место занимает оригинальная поэма на аккадском языке, прославляющая царя Мари Зимри-Лима (1774–1761 гг. до н. э.). Глиняная табличка с произведением, разбитая на три фрагмента, была обнаружена французскими археологами в одном из помещений царского дворца еще в 1936 г., но долгое время не ...
Added: October 16, 2023
Arkhipov I., Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires 2023 No. 1 P. 17–18
Added: June 22, 2023
Arkhipov I., Kogan L., Markina E., Journal of the American Oriental Society. American Oriental Society 2023 Vol. 143 No. 3 P. 537–553
The tablet ARET 13, 15 was published in 2003 by Pelio Fronzaroli among other Eblaite “testi di cancelleria,” providing a basis for studying the document. This edition was the first step toward understanding the text, establishing that it describes several episodes pertaining to Ebla’s relations with Mari, its principal rival in eastern Syria, at the ...
Added: December 5, 2022
Arkhipov I., Kogan L., Altorientalische Forschungen 2022 Vol. 49 No. 2 P. 183–196
The article aims at establishing new, more reliable meanings and functions for a number of lexical and semi-grammatical elements of Eblaite (Syrian East Semitic). The so-called “chancery texts”, first published by Pelio Fronzaroli and Amalia Catagnoti as ARET 13, 16 and 18, are in the focus of the analysis. While feasible contextual interpretation is an ...
Added: November 27, 2022
Arkhipov I., , in: The Oxford History of the Ancient Near EastVol. II: From the End of the Third Millennium BC to the Fall of Babylon.: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Ch. 15 P. 310–407.
Added: September 4, 2022
Arkhipov I., Bard K., Barjamovic G. et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
This groundbreaking, five-volume series offers a comprehensive, fully illustrated history of Egypt and Western Asia (the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran), from the emergence of complex states to the conquest of Alexander the Great. Written by a highly diverse, international team of leading scholars, the volumes in this series focus firmly on the political and ...
Added: September 4, 2022
Alexandrov B., Ориенталистика 2021 Т. 4 № 3 С. 596–619
The Akkadian expression ubānum ištēt ‘one finger’ is attested in Old Babylonian letters of the 18thcentury BCE as an allegoric description of a close alliance between rulers. Two hypotheses were advanced in the literature to explain the origin of this expression. According to the first one, the allegory of ‘one finger’ was based on a symbolic gesture ...
Added: February 3, 2022
Arkhipov I., Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale 2021 Vol. 115 P. 203–218
The Schøyen collection houses 474 letters of the Old Babylonian period including the first Sealand dynasty (p. x). Eighteen of them were published as AbB 10 145 (previously the Dring collection), CUSAS 9 1–15, and CUSAS 10 15 and 16. In the volume under review, Andrew George edited 216 letters from the Schøyen collection (including ...
Added: February 2, 2022
Loktionov A., Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2019 Vol. 24 P. 78–81
The last two decades have seen considerable advances in the holistic study of ancient Near Eastern law, spearheaded principally by works like the wide-ranging volumes written or edited by the late Raymond Westbrook. Equally, there has been much progress in our understanding of gender across the ancient Near East, as shown, for instance, by the ...
Added: November 25, 2021