Situating Kiṣir-Aššur’s Knowledge Production

Abstract

The mašmaš bīt Aššur-phase represents the final stage of Kiṣir-Aššur’s career, according to the surviving evidence. Based on the discussion of Kiṣir-Aššur’s surviving tablets in the preceding chapters, this chapter discusses KiṣirAššur’s overall text production to contextualize what he copied and used in relation to the scholarly textual traditions of his time. The first section investigates Kiṣir-Aššur’s medical focuses in his healing texts. The following section provides a discussion of Kiṣir-Aššur’s extracts (nisḫus). Kiṣir-Aššur produced a number of extracts, and these are found especially among tablets from his mašmaš bīt Aššur-phase and tablets that cannot be assigned to a specific phase. These extract texts are first discussed in relation to statements in the colophons that designate them as extracts from writing-boards. Other extracts were supplied with numbers and were likely organized. These numbered extracts are discussed in relation to their numbering, their possible organization, and their function. Afterwards follows an investigation of the use of incipits, catch-lines in colophons, and duplicate passages in Kiṣir-Aššur’s texts in relation to the therapeutic series šumma amēlu muḫḫašu umma ukāl “If the crown of a man’s head is feverish” (Ugu), known from contemporary Nineveh, and the so-called “Assur Medical Catalogue”, an Assur catalogue of text incipits possibly related to a recension of the Ugu series. This analysis examines to what extent KiṣirAššur drew on a recension of the therapeutic series and navigated according to its incipits. This chapter also addresses Kiṣir-Aššur’s text production in relation to the Exorcist’s Manual. Finally, Kiṣir-Aššur’s textual production is contextualized in the light of the scholarly traditions of Assur, his manuscripts derived from the Gula temple in Assur, and the N4 collection’s connection to the Nineveh text collections.