A fragment from a single-column clay cylinder now housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection (New Haven) preserves part of an Akkadian inscription of Ashurbanipal recording his restoration of Edimgalkalama ("House, Great Bond of the Land"), the temple of the god Anu rabû ("Great Anu" = Ištarān) at Dēr, in the east Tigris region. Although the name of neither the temple nor the city survives in this damaged text, it is fairly certain that the inscribed object was intended to be deposited in the mudbrick superstructure of Edimgalkalama since the god Anu rabû ("Great Anu") is invoked twice in the text's concluding formula. Ashurbanipal boasts that he raised the temple "as high as a mountain," a statement about the project that he does not record in his inscriptions from the Assyrian heartland.
Access the composite text [/rinap/rinap5/Q008354/] of Ashurbanipal 265.
The inscription is written in contemporary Babylonian script and each line of text is separated by a horizontal ruling. The edition is based on E. Frahm's edition and copy.
Although the cylinder was meant to be deposited in the structure of Edimgalkalama at Dēr (modern Tell Aqar), it is highly plausible, as Frahm has already suggested (Studies Parpola pp. 63–64), that the object came from Uruk (modern Warka) (1) since that Babylonian city was the origin of thousands of cuneiform texts purchased by Yale University now housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection; and (2) since there appears to have been "a rather intensive cultural exchange between the ancient cities of Der and Uruk" (ibid p. 63), as demonstrated by the fact that at least two Late Babylonian scholarly tablets bearing colophons stating that they were written in Dēr were unearthed during the German excavations at Uruk, in the library of Iqīšāya, a well-known exorcist in the early Hellenistic Period. On these grounds, Frahm (ibid p. 64) postulated that YBC 2368 "had at first likewise been housed in Anu rabû's temple in Der, but was then brought to the south with the other [scholarly] tablets [including SpTU 4 nos. 125 and 185] that eventually found their way to Uruk. The scholars of Uruk might have been interested in the text because Assurbanipal's qualities as a learned king and patron of the scribes were still remembered in Late Babylonian times, and because the name of Der's principal god, Anû rabû and Ištaran, resembled those of their own main deities, Anu and Ištar." Nevertheless, it is not impossible that the cylinder originates from Dēr, although Tell Aqar has never been excavated and only a few texts have been reportedly discovered there. For further details, see Frahm, Studies Parpola pp. 63–64.
With regard to Edimgalkalama, see George, House Most High p. 76 no. 166; and Frahm, Studies Parpola pp. 55–63. The inscription might have been composed sometime between mid-648 (after Abu [V] 30th) and Abu (V) 645, since Ashurbanipal worked on Anu rabû's temple after the Šamaš-šuma-ukīn rebellion had come to an end and since Edimgalkalama's completion is first recorded (at least according to the extant textual record) in Novotny and Jeffers, RINAP 5/1 pp. 209–221 Asb. 10 (Prism T) iii 15–17, the earliest known copy of which was inscribed on 6-V-645 (eponymy of Nabû-šar-aḫḫēšu). Presumably, the inscription written on YBC 2368 (this text) was composed earlier than Prism T (Asb. 10).
Jamie Novotny
Jamie Novotny, 'Inscriptions from Dēr (text no. 252)', RINAP 5: The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Aššur-etel-ilāni, and Sîn-šarra-iškun, The RINAP/RINAP 5 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2023 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap5/rinap53textintroductions/ashurbanipal/dertext265/]