temple for the goddess Annunitum (a form of Ishtar) and Ilaba in Babylon and to the capture of
Sharlak/g, king of the Guti. See Frayne 1997 : 183. Different classifications of year names are
possible; for instance, Sallaberger divided Shulgi’s year names into the categories kultisch,
innenpolitischand auβenpolitisch, Sallaberger 1999 : 141 – 143.
16 From the online year name collection at CDLI, to be found at http://cdli.ucla.edu.
17 CDLI, http://cdli.ucla.edu.
18 From CDLI, http://cdli.ucla.edu.
19 On Ur-Namma’s canal building, see Sallaberger 1999 : 135.
20 From CDLI, http://cdli.ucla.edu.
21 These Sargonic tablets are in fact sometimes referred to as an archive as mu iti(year, month)
tablets due to this distinctive system of calendrical calculation. The tablet here referred to is
Foster, B.R. ( 1982 ) Umma in the Sargonic Period, Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts
and Sciences 20 , Hamden, CT, p. 134. See also Sallaberger 1999 : 232.
22 Englund 1988 : 144 : “The various attempts to synchronize Lagash’ cultic calendar, comprising
some 40 month names, have been on the whole unconvincing.”
23 Cohen 1993 : 5. “Cult festivals based in part on the agricultural year dominated in the designation
of nearly all third millennium month names.” Englund, 1988 : 122 – 123. On Ur III month names,
see Sallaberger 1993 : 7 – 11.
24 Cohen 1993 : 297 ff. The earliest date for such a calendar seems to be the reign of Samsu-iluna.
25 Mesopotamia was hardly unique in the ancient world in its calendrical anarchy. Classical Greek
city-states also had their own month names and in fact would start the year in different seasons.
26 For instance, how Umma’s local calendar related to the Reichskalendaris still a work in progress,
see Sharlach 1993 : 25 , 57.
27 Horowitz 1996 : 37. An ideal three-year cycle in which two years were regular, lunar years with
twelve months of about 354 days each, and a third year with an intercalation or leap month added,
making that year approximately 384 days. One should then have seven leap months for every
nineteen years to keep the lunar and solar calendars running more or less in synch.
28 Whiting 1979 : 22. Intercalations were not always placed at the same point in the year, for reasons
which are now obscure. They could go between months five and twelve in some calendars, or after
month eleven or twelve in others. Gomi 1984 : 6 and Whiting 1979 : 17.
29 Gomi 1979 : 3. Amar-Sin year two, for instance, was intercalary at Ur but not Puzrish-Dagan.
Even sites in the same province, such as Nippur and Puzrish-dagan, do not necessarily intercalate
in the same year. Whiting 1979 : 28
30 For example, the filing tag TRU 2 notes that in the years Shulgi 26 – 41 there were six inter-
calations. Gomi 1979 : 6.
31 See note 22.
32 That is, month i, month i min, month ii, month iii min, and so on. To top it all off, an intercalary
month (dirig) was also added in this year! According to Whiting, “The idea that this year actually
had nineteen months is clearly impossible.” Whiting 1979 : 25. Lacking any other explanation, we
should perhaps entertain the possibility that what appears to be a nineteen month year was in fact
just that. See also Sallaberger 1999 : 237.
33 Sallaberger 1993 : 5. Surprisingly, this was months 6 – 12 , not 1 – 7. Sallaberger 1999 : 237.
34 Sasson 1992 : 184 footnote 7 : “The hopelessly muddled debate about the Sabbath’s Babylonian
origins is, however, coming to a sane end, with a clear rejection that Israel had... ‘borrowed’
the concept and the institution from Mesopotamia.”
REFERENCESBoyer, C. ( 1991 ) A History of Mathematics(second edition, revised U. Merzbach). New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1968 , rev. 1991.
Civil, M. ( 1996 ) Notes on Sumerian lexicography, I. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 20 : 119 – 124.
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