An Akkadian inscription of Ashurbanipal that describes how the king enlarged the courtyard of the temple Ešaḫula ("House of the Happy Heart") with bricks baked in a ritually-pure kiln and made its processional way "shine like daylight" is found on numerous bricks discovered in a temple dedicated to the god Nergal, "the lord of Sirara," at Mê-Turān/Mê-Turnat (modern Tell Ḥaddād).
Access the composite text [/rinap/rinap5/Q008346/] or the score [/rinap/scores/Q008346/] of Ashurbanipal 257
The bricks were found in situ in 1980. The texts are inscribed (not stamped) and the script is contemporary Babylonian. No excavation or museum numbers are known for any of the bricks. According to F. Rashid, the numerous copies of the text differ from one another with regard to the particular cuneiform signs used and with regard to the length of the titles given to the god Nergal, the divine owner of Ešaḫula. Rashid published hand-drawn facsimiles and editions of two of the bricks. These two objects have not been seen, neither in the original nor in photograph, and are thus edited from the published copies.
The edition presented below follows ex. 1. Since the first two lines of ex. 2 diverge substantially from ex. 1, they are presented separately here:
Both exemplars are presented in full in the score on Oracc, but without a master line.
Grant Frame & Jamie Novotny
Grant Frame & Jamie Novotny, 'Inscriptions from Mê-Turān (text no. 257)', 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/meturantext257/]