Time at Emar: The Cultic Calendar and the Rituals from the Diviner's ArchiveEisenbrauns, 2000 - 352 من الصفحات The recent large-scale watershed projects in northern Syria, where the ancient city of Emar was located, have brought this area to light, thanks to salvage operation excavations before the area was submerged. Excavations at Meskeneh-Qadimeh on the great bend of the Euphrates River revealed this large town, which had been built in the late 14th century and then destroyed violently at the beginning of the 12th, at the end of the Bronze Age. In the town of Emar, ritual tablets were discovered in a temple that are demonstrated to have been recorded by the supervisor of the local cult, who was called the "diviner." This religious leader also operated a significant writing center, which focused on both administering local ritual and fostering competence in Mesopotamian lore. An archaic local calendar can be distinguished from other calendars in use at Emar, both foreign and local. A second, overlapping calendar emanated from the palace and represented a rising political force in some tension with rooted local institutions. The archaic local calendar can be partially reconstructed from one ritual text that outlines the rites performed during a period of six months. The main public rite of Emar's religious calendar was the zukru festival. This event was celebrated in a simplified annual ritual and in a more elaborate version of the ritual for seven days during every seventh year, probably serving as a pledge of loyalty to the chief god, Dagan. The Emar ritual calendar was native, in spite of various levels of outside influence, and thus offers important evidence for ancient Syrian culture. These texts are thus important for ancient Near Eastern cultic and ritual studies. Fleming's comprehensive study lays the basic groundwork for all future study of the ritual and makes a major contribution to the study of ancient Syria. |
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... tion would explain various details in the archive regarding supervision of local cultic affairs. One text actually records the explicitly plural form, é dingirmes. The installation of the nin.dingir priestess mentions the place only as ...
... tion of the nin.dingir priestess, the House of the Gods contributes a long list of luxuries, while the bit tukli provides her allotment of barley.102 According to this ritual tablet, the grain for the priestess is administered through a ...
... tion EZEN ('festival') is omitted in the B text for 375:1, whereas it is used consistently with every reference to the zukru in the long text 373:35, 39, 64, 174, 210. Any other evidence for 375 is lost in the breaks, though Dagan ...
... tion is ruled off from the ritual proper. 11 Single-line rulings are naturally reserved for subsidiary units. 12 Although several calendar introductions are lost in the longer first part of the text, the 14th and 15th days of the month ...
... tion or in general terms.18 The main concern of part II is the conducting of the gods out of and back to the city, especially the passage of Dagan between the up- right stones.19 Procession in the zukru does not concern only the ...