The Elevation of Marduk Revisited: Festivals and Sacrifices at Nippur during the High Kassite Period

This article edits two previously unpublished Kassite period texts from Nippur. Their contents raise three points about cultic practice and ideological transmission in Babylonia under Kassite rule. First, they demonstrate that, by the thirteenth century, akītu celebrations connected to Marduk and the city of Babylon were being held at Nippur, and therefore contain the earliest, explicit references to the akītu festival of Marduk from a southern Mesopotamian city that is not Babylon. This discovery forces reappraisals of some aspects of the development of the elevated Marduk ideology and the proposed Babylon +Nippur/Marduk+Enlil pairing. Second, one of the texts, CBS 10616, presents clear evidence of rituals and celebrations that have been hinted at in later scholarly works, such as Astrolabe B, OECT 11: 69+70 and the Nippur Compendium, but whose practice heretofore has never been directly attested. Third, these texts and associated issues ostensibly alter current views on the adoption of Nippur cultic ideology by institutions in Babylon and Ashur throughout the second and early first millennium. They are particularly germane to the mechanisms, timing, and sources by which Babylonian intellectual and religious thought found its way into the written record of Assyria.