Inscriptions from Uncertain Provenance (text no. 270)

Ashurbanipal 270

A silver vessel with gold leaf now housed in the Miho Museum (Japan) bears a one-line proprietary inscription of Ashurbanipal. The inscription is written on the outer rim of the vessel's lip in small cuneiform characters. The object, which has been part of the museum's collection since 1998, might have come from one of the cave treasures discovered in Iran during the early 1990s, but its ultimate provenance is unknown. Although the text appears to be a genuine Ashurbanipal inscription, the authenticity of the gold-leafed beaker cannot be verified given its uncertain provenance and the highly unusual medium upon which this short Akkadian inscription is written (compare, for example, a silver bucket of Esarhaddon [Leichty, RINAP 4 pp. 281–282 Esarhaddon 140; photo in Seipel, 7000 Jahre p. 205 no. 117]). Because the text could possibly be an actual seventh-century Assyrian inscription, based on its contents and orthography, this inscription is included — albeit tentatively — in the present volume.

Access the composite text [/rinap/rinap5/Q008359/] of Ashurbanipal 270.

Source: Miho Museum, SF 4.061

Bibliography

1999 Bleibtreu, Vergoldeter Silberbecher (copy, edition, study, provenance)

2000 Muscarella, Source 20/1 pp. 29–37 (photo, study)

2001 Albenda, JAOS 121 pp. 145–146 (study)

Joshua Jeffers

Joshua Jeffers, 'Inscriptions from Uncertain Provenance (text no. 270)', 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/uncertainprovenancetext270/]

The RINAP 5 sub-project of the University of Pennsylvania-based RINAP Project, 2015–23. The contents of RINAP 5 are prepared in cooperation with the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), which is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007–23.
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