Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiösen Inhalts, often abbreviated as KAR, is a two-volume

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

publication by the Assyriologist from 1919 to 1923. The work offers a critical edition of several hundred

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

tablets discovered during 1903–1914 German excavations directed by Walter Andrae and Julius Jordan in the former

Assyria Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , ''māt Aššur'') was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization that existed as a city-state from the 21st century BC to the 14th century BC and eventually expanded into an empire from the 14th century BC t ...

n capital city

Assur Aššur (; AN.ŠAR2KI, Assyrian cuneiform: ''Aš-šurKI'', "City of God Aššur"; ''Āšūr''; ''Aθur'', ''Āšūr''; ', ), also known as Ashur and Qal'at Sherqat, was the capital of the Old Assyrian city-state (2025–1364 BC), the Midd ...

, dating to the reign of

Ashurbanipal Ashurbanipal (, meaning " Ashur is the creator of the heir")—or Osnappar ()—was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BC to his death in 631. He is generally remembered as the last great king of Assyria. Ashurbanipal inherited the th ...

(7th century BC). The compiled inscriptions also form one of the main primary sources for the tablets used in reconstructing the famous creation epic, the Enuma Elish. Inscriptions in KAR are itemized according to the order of their appearance in the work. Therefore, the 34th tablet is numbered as KAR 34. Volume 1 contains inscriptions KAR 1–175, and Volume 2 contains inscriptions KAR 176–472. A number of inscriptions from KAR have been digitized and more information about them can now be found on databases including the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus).

Important inscriptions

Several inscriptions in KAR have aided the understanding of the

ancient Near East The ancient Near East was home to many cradles of civilization, spanning Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran (or Persia), Anatolia and the Armenian highlands, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula. As such, the fields of ancient Near East studies and Nea ...

. KAR 307, which dates to the 1st millennium BC and is 63 lines long, offers a lot of information about ancient Near Eastern cosmology. Another significant tablet from Ebeling's collection is KAR 158, which continues to be studied as containing one of the closest parallels to the biblical

Song of Songs The Song of Songs (), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a Biblical poetry, biblical poem, one of the five ("scrolls") in the ('writings'), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, i ...

. KAR 44, otherwise known as the Exorcists Manual and composed by a figure named Esagil-kin-apli, is also prominent. Several important medical texts would also be included, but a future, more dedicated work by Ebeling and Reginald Campbell Thompson, namely the four-volume Keilschrifttexte medizinischen Inhalts, presented a collection of works that quickly surpassed KAR in enabling a broader understanding of

Babylonia Babylonia (; , ) was an Ancient history, ancient Akkadian language, Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in the city of Babylon in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and parts of Kuwait, Syria and Iran). It emerged as a ...

n and Assyrian

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

References

Sources

* * * * *

External links

* Volume 1 (

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

) * Volume 2 (

) Assyriology Cuneiform German books {{ANE-hist-book-stub

Important inscriptions

See also

References

Sources

External links