The ‘Prostration Hemerology’ Revisited: An Everyman’s Manual at the King’s Court

Abstract

Abstract: The ‘Prostration Hemerology’, with its seemingly random selection of dates and plethora of unparalleled prescriptions – such as the towing of boats upstream, the kissing of ecstatics, and the impregnating of street women –, is one of the most peculiar hemerologies in Alasdair Livingstone’s recent anthology of the genre. This article attempts a new reconstruction of the text which differs from Livingstone’s in several respects. To this end it uses eight previously unpublished manuscripts, identified in the collections of the Ancient Orient Museum of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, the University Museum (Philadelphia), and the British Museum. Thanks to these and the collation of the other five tablets used by Livingstone, an almost complete reconstruction of the text is now possible. It reveals itself to be an influential hemerology: as well as being widely cited by scholars at the Assyrian court, it was extensively quoted in later hemerological compilations.

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