Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
The Neo-Babylonian Sippar tablet edited below, previously published in photograph only, is a unique member of a group of first-millennium cuneiform astronomical texts commonly known as ziqpu-star texts. Like other members of this group, the tablet's reverse side provides a list of ziqpu-stars (stars which culminated near the centre of the sky when viewed from Assyria or Babylonia) and measures the intervals between these culminations. What is novel about our text is that it is written on a round tablet that preserves on its obverse the remains of circular diagram or planisphere of the ziqpu-stars in the sky. Below we present an edition of the list of ziqpu-stars on the reverse, followed by a study of the planisphere on the obverse and remarks on the place of the tablet in the corpus of cuneiform astronomical texts.
Tablets from the Sippar Library are published by generous leave of the University of Baghdad and the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage, Baghdad. The authors also record their gratitude to the British School of Archaeology in Iraq for its continued aid in support of Dr Al-Rawi's work. They also wish to acknowledge the contributions of C. B. F. Walker to the study of the Sippar tablet edited below.