Bad-Tibira edit
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Coordinates: 31°46′N 46°00′E / 31.767, 46

Foundation nail dedicated by Entemena, king of Lagash, to the god of Bad-Tibira (Musée du Louvre)

Bad-tibira, "wall of copper worker(s)",1 identified as modern Tell al-Madineh, between Ash-Shatrah and Senkerch (ancient Larsa) in southern Iraq,2) was an ancient Sumerian city, that appears among antediluvian cities in the Babylonian lists. Its Akkadian name was Dûr-gurgurri.3

The name means metal worker in Sumerian. It was also called Παντιβίβλος Pantibiblos by Greek authors (Abydenus, Apollodorus, Berossus).

According to the Sumerian king list, Bad-tibira was the second city to "exercise kingship" in Sumer, following Eridu. These kings were En-men-lu-ana, En-men-gal-ana and Dumuzid, the Shepherd. Some badly effaced half-bricks on the surface of the mound bore the inscription of Amar-Sin, of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Pieces of vitrified brick scattered over the surface of the large mound bore witness to the city's destruction by fire.4 Possession of the city passed between Larsa, whose king Sin-Iddinam claims to have built the great wall of Bad-tibira, and Isin, whose king Lipit-Ishtar, "the shepherd of Nippur", claimed to have built the "House of Righteousness" there.5

The main god of the city was Lugal, the "king".6 The city's temple, E-mush-kalamma, was mentioned in the tale of Inanna's descent to the underworld. The "brotherhood text" in cuneiform inscriptions on cones plundered from the site in the 1930s records the friendship pact of Entemena, governor of Lagash, and Lugal-kinishedudu, governor of Uruk. It identifies Entemena as the builder of the temple E-mush7 to Inanna and Dumuzi, under his local epithet Lugal-E-mush.8

Notes

  1. ^ W.F. Albright and T.O. Lambdin, "The Evidence of Language", in The Cambridge Ancient History I, part 1 (Cambridge University Press), 1970: 150.
  2. ^ Vaughn E. Crawford, "The Location of Bad-Tibira", Iraq 22 "Ur in Retrospect. In Memory of Sir C. Leonard Woolley" (Spring - Autumn 1960:197-199); the secure identification is based on the recovery at the pillaged site of fragments of a known inscription of Entemena that had surfaced in the black market without provenance. Earlier excavations at a mound called Medain near the site of Lagash, following a report of a vendor of one of the inscriptions, had proved fruitless: see H. de Genouillac, Fouilles de Telloh, ii:139 (noted by Crawford 1960:197 note 7).
  3. ^ Collection of taxes from Dûr-gurgurri features in correpondence of Hammurabi (first half of the 18th century BCE) noted in L. W. King and H. R. Hall, Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of Recent Discoveries (New York, 2005) p. 306f; it remained a city of metal-workers and the principal settlement of the guild of gugurrē, "metalworkers" (L. W. King, The Letters And Inscriptions Of Hammurabi, King Of Babylon About B.C. 2200 vol. III, p. 21, note 2.).
  4. ^ Crawford 1960:198.
  5. ^ Ferris J. Stephens, "A Newly Discovered Inscription of Libit-Ishtar" Journal of the American Oriental Society 52.2 (June 1932):182-185) p. 183.
  6. ^ Lulal is a misreading.
  7. ^ Presumably the same temple as E-mush-kalamma, according to Crawford.
  8. ^ Crawford 1960:197.

See also

External links

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