Writing and imagining ritual in the Babylonian New Year festival texts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4299717 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Céline Debourse (0009-0000-6064-0278, Harvard University Press, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religion Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1749-8171 • E-ISSN: 1749-8171 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/rec3.12489 |
| OpenAlex | W4392088433 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
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
Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Assyria · Cult · Cuneiform · Literature · Monarchy · Persian · Politics · Theology · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Classics · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |