Warad-Sin
Warad-Sin ruled the ancient Near East city-state of Larsa from 1770 BC to 1758 BC. There are indications that his father Kudur-Mabuk was co-regent or at least the power behind the throne, his sister En-ane-du was high priestess of the moon god in Ur. Annals survive for his complete 12-year reign, he recorded that in his second year as king, he destroyed the walls of Kazallu, defeated the army of Mutibal that had occupied Larsa. Chronology of the ancient Near East Kings of Larsa Warad-Sin Year Names at CDLI
Lipit-Ishtar
Lipit-Ishtar was the 5th king of the First Dynasty of Isin, according to the "Sumerian King List". According to the SKL: he was the successor of Išme-Dagān. Ur-Ninurta succeeded Lipit-Ištar; some documents and royal inscriptions from his time have survived, however. The annals of Lipit-Ištar's reign recorded that he repulsed the Amorites; the text exists on several partial fragments. The following complete laws have been reconstructed: §8 If a man gave bare ground to another man to set out as an orchard and the latter did not complete setting out that bare ground as an orchard, he shall give to the man who set out the orchard the bare ground which he neglected as part of his share.§9 If a man entered the orchard of another man and was seized there for stealing, he shall pay ten shekels of silver.§10 If a man cut down a tree in the garden of another man, he shall pay one-half mina of silver.§11 If adjacent to the house of a man the bare ground of another man has been neglected and the owner of the house has said to the owner of the bare ground, "Because your ground has been neglected someone may break into my house: strengthen your house," and this agreement has been confirmed by him, the owner of the bare ground shall restore to the owner of the house any of his property, lost.§12 If a slave-girl or slave of a man has fled into the heart of the city and it has been confirmed that he dwelt in the house of man for one month, he shall give slave for slave.§13 If he has no slave, he shall pay fifteen shekels of silver.§14 If a man's slave has compensated his slave-ship to his master and it is confirmed his master two-fold, that slave shall be freed.§15 If a miqtum is the grant of a king, he shall not be taken away.§16 If a miqtum went to a man of his own free will, that man shall not hold him.
Afterwards, the man who bore the tax of the estate shall possess that estate and the former owner of the estate shall not raise any claim.§22 If the father is living, his daughter whether she be a high priestess, a priestess, or a hierodule shall dwell in his house like an heir.§24 If the second wife whom he had married bore him children, the dowry which she brought from her father's house belongs to her children but the children of his first wife and the children of his second wife shall divide the property of their father.§25 If a man married his wife and she bore him children and those children are living, a slave bore children for her master but the father granted freedom to the slave and her children, the children of the slave shall not divide the estate with the children of their former master.§27 If a man's wife has not borne him children but a harlot from the public square has borne him children, he shall provide grain and clothing for that harlot. The children which the harlot has borne him shall be his heirs, as long as his wife lives the harlot shall not live in the house with the wife.§29 If a son-in-law has entered the house of his father-in-law and afterwards they made him go out and gave his wife to his companion, they shall present to him the betrothal gifts which he brought and that wife may not marry his companion.§34 If a man rented an ox and injured the flesh at the nose ring, he shall pay one-third of its price.§35 If a man rented an ox and damaged its eye, he shall pay one-half its price.§36 If a man rented an ox and broke its horn, he shall pay one-fourth its price.§37 If a man rented an ox and damaged its tail, he shall pay one-fourth its price.
IsinSumerAmoritesCuneiform lawHistory of SumerSumerian people James R. Court, Codex Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Scholars Press, 1995. Francis R. Steele, The Code of Lipit Ishtar - University of Pennsylvania Museum Monographs, 1948 - includes complete text and analysis of all fragments
Enlil-bani
Enlil-bāni, ca. 1798 BC – 1775 BC or 1860 – 1837 BC, was the 10th king of the 1st Dynasty of Isin and reigned 24 years according to the Ur-Isin kinglist. He is best known for the legendary and apocryphal manner of his ascendancy. A certain Ikūn-pî-Ištar is recorded as having ruled for 6 months or a year, between the reigns of Erra-imittī and Enlil-bāni according to two variant copies of a chronicle. Another chronicle which might have shed further light on his origins is too broken to translate. A lengthy inscription proclaims: In Nippur I established justice, promoted righteousness. I sought out nourishment for them like sheep, fed them with fresh grass. I settled them down in a firm place. Having established justice in Nippur and made their hearts content, I established justice and righteousness in Isin and made the heart of the land content. I reduced the barley-tax, at one-fifth, to one-tenth; the muškēnum served only four days in the month. The livestock of the palace had grazed on the fields of … who had cried out with the appeal, “O Šamaš” - I turned the palace livestock out of their ploughed fields and banished those people’s cries of “O Šamaš.”
Hegemony over Nippur was fleeting, with control of the city passing back and forth between Isin and Larsa several times. Uruk, seceded during his reign and, as his power crumbled, he may have had the Chronicle of Early Kings redacted to provide a more legendary tale of his accession than the rather mundane act of usurpation that it may well have been, it relates that Erra-Imittī selected his gardener, Enlil-bâni, enthroned him, placed the royal tiara on his head. Erra-Imittī died while eating hot porridge, Enlil-bâni by virtue of his refusal to quit the throne, became king; the colophon of a medical text, “when a man's brain contains fire,” from the Library of Ashurbanipal reads: “Proven and tested salves and poultices, fit for use, according to the old sages from before the flood from Šuruppak, which Enlil-muballiṭ, sage of Nippur, left in the second year of Enlil-bāni.”Enlil-bāni found it necessary to "build anew the wall of Isin which had become dilapidated," which he recorded on commemorative cones.
He named the wall Enlil-bāni-išdam-kīn, “Enlil-bāni is firm as to foundation.” In practice, the walls of major cities were under continuous repair. He was a prodigious builder, responsible for the construction of the é-ur-gi7-ra, “the dog house,” temple of Ninisina, a palace the é-ní-dúb-bu, “house of relaxation,” for the goddess Nintinugga, “lady who revives the dead,” the é-dim-gal-an-na, “house - great mast of heaven,” for the tutelary deity of Šuruppak, the goddess Sud, the é-ki-ág-gá-ni for Ninibgal, the “lady with patient mercy who loves ex-votos, who heeds prayers and entreaties, his shining mother.” Two large copper statues were taken to Nippur for dedication to Ningal, which Iddin-Dagān had fashioned 117 years earlier but had been unable to deliver, “on account of this, the goddess Ninlil had the god Enlil lengthen the life span of Enlil-Bāni.”There are two hymns addressed to this monarch. Enlil-bāni year-names at CDLI. A praise poem of Enlil-bāni at ETCSL
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Babylonia
Babylonia was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia. A small Amorite-ruled state emerged in 1894 BC, which contained the minor administrative town of Babylon, it was a small provincial town during the Akkadian Empire but expanded during the reign of Hammurabi in the first half of the 18th century BC and became a major capital city. During the reign of Hammurabi and afterwards, Babylonia was called "the country of Akkad", a deliberate archaism in reference to the previous glory of the Akkadian Empire, it was involved in rivalry with the older state of Assyria to the north and Elam to the east in Ancient Iran. Babylonia became the major power in the region after Hammurabi created a short-lived empire, succeeding the earlier Akkadian Empire, Third Dynasty of Ur, Old Assyrian Empire; the Babylonian Empire, however fell apart after the death of Hammurabi and reverted to a small kingdom. Like Assyria, the Babylonian state retained the written Akkadian language for official use, despite its Northwest Semitic-speaking Amorite founders and Kassite successors, who spoke a language isolate, not being native Mesopotamians.
It retained the Sumerian language for religious use, but by the time Babylon was founded, this was no longer a spoken language, having been wholly subsumed by Akkadian. The earlier Akkadian and Sumerian traditions played a major role in Babylonian and Assyrian culture, the region would remain an important cultural center under its protracted periods of outside rule; the earliest mention of the city of Babylon can be found in a clay tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad, dating back to the 23rd century BC. Babylon was a religious and cultural centre at this point and neither an independent state nor a large city. After the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, the south Mesopotamian region was dominated by the Gutian people for a few decades before the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur, which restored order to the region and which, apart from northern Assyria, encompassed the whole of Mesopotamia, including the town of Babylon. Mesopotamia had enjoyed a long history prior to the emergence of Babylon, with Sumerian civilisation emerging in the region c. 3500 BC, the Akkadian-speaking people appearing by the 30th century BC.
During the 3rd millennium BC, an intimate cultural symbiosis occurred between Sumerian and Akkadian-speakers, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian and vice versa is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic and phonological convergence; this has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium as a sprachbund. Akkadian replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of Mesopotamia somewhere around the turn of the third and the second millennium BC. From c. 3500 BC until the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th century BC, Mesopotamia had been dominated by Sumerian cities and city states, such as Ur, Uruk, Isin, Adab, Gasur, Hamazi, Akshak and Umma, although Semitic Akkadian names began to appear on the king lists of some of these states between the 29th and 25th centuries BC. Traditionally, the major religious center of all Mesopotamia was the city of Nippur where the god Enlil was supreme, it would remain so until replaced by Babylon during the reign of Hammurabi in the mid-18th century BC.
The Akkadian Empire saw the Akkadian Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia unite under one rule, the Akkadians attain ascendancy over the Sumerians and indeed come to dominate much of the ancient Near East. The empire disintegrated due to economic decline, climate change and civil war, followed by attacks by the Gutians from the Zagros Mountains. Sumer rose up again with the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late 22nd century BC, ejected the Gutians from southern Mesopotamia, they seem to have gained ascendancy over much of the territory of the Akkadian kings of Assyria in northern Mesopotamia for a time. Followed by the collapse of the Sumerian "Ur-III" dynasty at the hands of the Elamites in 2002 BC, the Amorites, a foreign Northwest Semitic-speaking people, began to migrate into southern Mesopotamia from the northern Levant gaining control over most of southern Mesopotamia, where they formed a series of small kingdoms, while the Assyrians reasserted their independence in the north; the states of the south were unable to stem the Amorite advance, for a time may have relied on their fellow Akkadians in Assyria for protection.
King Ilu-shuma of the Old Assyrian Empire in a known inscription describes his exploits to the south as follows: The freedom of the Akkadians and their children I established. I purified their copper. I established their freedom from the border of the marshes and Ur and Nippur and Kish, Der of the goddess Ishtar, as far as the City of. Past scholars extrapolated from this text that it means he defeated the invading Amorites to the south and Elamites to the east, but there is no explicit record of that, some scholars believe the Assyrian kings were giving preferential trade agreements to the south; these policies were continued by Ikunum. However, when Sargon I s
Nabopolassar
Nabopolassar was a Chaldean king of Babylonia and a central figure in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The death of Assyrian king Ashurbanipal around 627 BC resulted in political instability. In 626 BC, a native dynasty arose under Nabopolassar, he ruled over Babylonia for a period of about twenty years. He is credited with founding the Neo-Babylonian Empire. By 616 BC, Nabopolassar had united the entire area under his rule. Nabopolassar formed an alliance with Cyaxares of the Medes to confront the Assyrians and their Egyptian allies. By 615 BC he had seized Nippur, he led his forces to assist the Medes besieging the city of Ashur, but the Babylonian army did not reach the battlefield until after the city had fallen. Assyria, weakened by internal strife and ineffectual rule, was unable to resist the Babylonians and the Medes, who united to sack the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BC. Following a prolonged siege at the Battle of Nineveh, Nabopolassar took control of the city. Ashur-uballit II was a tartan in the army.
He became king after Sin-shar-ishkun, who may have been his brother, who died during the fall of Nineveh. Ashur-uballit II rallied his troops at the city of Harran in northern Syria; the following year the Babylonians plundered the region of Harran, in 610 BC, Nabopolassar captured the city. In the spring of 609 BC, Necho II of Egypt led a sizable force to help the Assyrians. At the head of a large army, consisting of mercenaries, Necho took the coastal Via Maris into Syria, supported by his Mediterranean fleet along the shore, he prepared to cross the ridge of hills which shuts in on the south the great Jezreel Valley, but he found his passage blocked by the Judean army. Their king, sided with the Babylonians and attempted to block his advance at Megiddo, where a fierce battle was fought and Josiah was killed. Necho continued on and joining forces with Ashur-uballit, they crossed the Euphrates and laid siege to Harran. Failing to capture Harran, they retreated to northern Syria. In 605 BC, Nabopolassar's son, crown prince Nebuchadnezzar fought Necho and the remnants of the Assyrian army at the Battle of Carchemish.
Within months of his abdication in 605 BC, Nabopolassar died of natural causes at about 53 years of age, Nebuchadnezzar II hurried to Babylon to secure the throne. During Nabopolassar's reign, there was a boom of Neo-Babylonian building projects that would continue through the reign of his son, Nebuchadnezzar II. Temples and ziggurats were repaired or rebuilt in all the old dynastic cities, while Babylon itself was enlarged and surrounded by a double enceinte, or line of fortification, consisting of towered and moated fortress walls; the first mention of Nebuchadnezzar II comes from the records of Nabopolassar, saying he was a laborer in the restoration of the temple of Marduk. A cylinder found in 1921 in Baghdad, Iraq is attributed to Nabopolassar, he is described therein as pious, that he "sought out the temples... and the complete performance of their rites." He attributes his success to Shazu. Throughout the inscription, Nabopolassar describes some of his greatest military conquests and submits himself to Marduk and other deities.
Babylonia Kings of Babylonia ABC 2: Chronicle Concerning the Early Years of Nabopolassar ABC 3: Chronicle Concerning the Fall of Nineveh ABC 4: Chronicle Concerning the Late Years of Nabopolassar Nabopolassar Cylinder
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