“War Prisoners as Gift of the King Rīm-Anum to Goddesses and Gods: Two New Texts”

This paper presents a study on a group of nine cuneiform texts coming from the bīt asīrī, “the house of prisoners of war”, dating to the kingdom of Rīm-Anum, in which the gift of war prisoners by the king to different deities is registered. The majority of the bīt asīrī texts bring a Rīm-Anum-year-name. Therefore, as far as we can currently tell, they need to be dated in the short period between the 8th‒10th years of the reign of Samsu-iluna (1742‒1740 BC), i.e. during the rebellion of South Mesopotamia against the central administration of Babylon. During the reign of Rīm-Anum the bīt asīrī—located exactly in the city of Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, was an institutional entity, where the prisoners of war were held captives, under the supervision of an ugula asīrī, almost always Sîn-šemi, from their arrival up to the time of their assignment, or between one assignment and another. It was managed by the state, and probably connected to a granary and with the production of flour where the prisoners were employed as grinders, at least during the period in which they stay inside bīt asīrī. Among the bīt asīrī texts, very interesting is a small group of cuneiform tablets that register the presentation of war prisoners as offerings by the king to some gods or goddesses such as the goddesses Nanāya and Kanisurra or the gods Rammānum, Šamaš, Lugal-irra and Meslamtaea, obviously the last two together in the same text. In the majority of these texts the prisoners are received by the sanga-officials, the chief-administrator of the temple of each god. In the paper I will present all these already published texts in their chronological order. To these already published texts, I add two unpublished texts coming from the bīt asīrī, kept at the British Museum, that register the gift of prisoners by the king to the gods Šubula and Enlil.