In and around the Court of Bēl and the Cultic Topography of the Esagil according to Late Babylonian Ritual Texts

Riva, Rocío Da

doi:10.1515/9781501514661-007

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2022

2024

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“…This pronounced concern for the cult is also reflected in the relative abundance of cuneiform ritual texts the Babylonian priesthood produced at this time (e.g., Da Riva, 2021, 2019; see also Debourse, 2022, pp. 348–371).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing and imagining ritual in the Babylonian New Year festival texts

Debourse

2024

Religion Compass

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In cuneiform culture the New Year Festival was an important ritual of kingship. The most fundamental source for the reconstruction of this festival is a small corpus of cuneiform ritual texts that describe the ritual actions and prayers to be performed during the first days of the year. Those texts were written by Babylonian priests during the Persian‐Hellenistic period (484–140 BCE), when Babylonia had come under foreign rule. Why were these ritual texts outlining a royal ritual created at a time when Babylonia was governed by foreign rulers, who had little interest in Babylonian religious traditions? Why write down rituals at all? In this paper, I show how these New Year Festival texts are programmatic more than instructional, as they give shape to a new ritual paradigm in which Babylonian priests, not kings, are the central authority of the cult.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%