The present series of publications, Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (RINBE), is intended to present a comprehensive, modern scholarly edition of the complete corpus of official inscriptions of the last native kings of Babylon (625–539 BC), which comprises about 230 compositions written on approximately 1,500 clay and stone objects. RINBE is modeled on the publications of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) series and the recently completed Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) series and is the successor of both of these. Although some of RINBE's contents have been publicly available online since August 2015 via the "Babylon 7" sub-project of the open-access Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo) project, the project officially began in June 2017, when we, RINBE's co-founders and directors, established the series' editorial board, its team of consultants, and the books' authors.
In the next year, by 2025, RINBE will have created a complete and authoritative modern presentation of the entire corpus of the royal inscriptions of the six kings of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the shape of three books and in a fully annotated, linguistically tagged, Open Access and Open Data digital format. In addition to this core data, the online version offers substantial metadata and contextualization resources, as well as linkage to further external resources. The online facilities include:
As part of the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI) based at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München's Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department), RINBE's contents are fully integrated into the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) Project, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), and the Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Polities (ARMEP) map interface. The print publications, like the RINAP volumes, are published by Eisenbrauns, now an imprint of Penn State University Press. They use the same formatting as the RINAP publications, but with one important addition: Gold Standard Open Access publishing, that is, PDFs of the print publications are available for free download without an embargo period directly upon publication.
This book is the first volume in the RINBE series and the first part of the two-part volume of the inscriptions of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. Like RINBE 2, this present volume was principally prepared by Jamie Novotny and Frauke Weiershäuser, with the input of valuable expertise from members of the series' editorial board and its team of consultants, as well as three external accessors, from whose close collaboration RINBE greatly benefits.
Among the latter, we would like to single out the late Robert K. Englund, the founder and former director of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). From RINBE's inception until his untimely death on May 24th, 2020, Bob meticulously integrated RINBE catalogue metadata and transliterations into CDLI's open-access database, thereby making Neo-Babylonian inscriptions more visible and more accessible. With deep gratitude and a sense of great loss, we think of Bob, a true pioneer and visionary in the digital humanities, and thank him for the time and enthusiasm that he devoted not only to our project but to digital cuneiform studies at large.
The present volume is dedicated to Olof Pedersén, who has been a hugely important consultant to the project since 2019. Olof has generously shared his unmatched knowledge of Robert Koldewey's excavations at Babylon (1899–1917) and provided detailed information about the numerous inscribed Neo-Babylonian clay and stone objects that were then discovered, including the museum and excavation numbers, find spots, and excavation photo numbers of many of the artifacts included in the present volume. His command of this material draws on decades of research and has substantially improved the quality of the information provided in RINBE. We are extremely grateful for Olof"s kindness and generosity in sharing his time and insight. This book would not have been the same without his involvement.
Moreover, we are very happy to express our deep appreciation to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and LMU Munich, which through the establishment of the Karen Radner's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East in 2015 allowed this publication project to find a home at LMU's History Department. Both institutions provided crucial financial support for our work. Furthermore, LMU invested funds in creating Frauke Weiershäuser's research position, and this enabled prioritizing the publication project within MOCCI.
In addition, research grants awarded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf) to Jamie Novotny in 2018 and to Jamie Novotny and Karen Radner in 2019 were instrumental in quickly implementing the work program, especially by enabling the team to collate original objects kept in the British Museum (London), the Iraq Museum (Baghdad), and the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Berlin). We would like to express our profound thanks and are enormously grateful for the warm support that RINBE has received from these institutions, especially the Vorderasiatisches Museum, whose director, Barbara Helwing, has graciously made all relevant finds from the Babylon excavations accessible to us. We are honored and pleased to cooperate with the VAM's Babylon Project.
Munich and Philadelphia February 2024
Karen Radner and Grant Frame
The Directors
Karen Radner & Grant Frame
Karen Radner & Grant Frame , ' Directors' Foreword ', RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, The RIBo Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2024 [/ribo/babylon7/RINBE11FrontMatter/]