The lexical list known as Weidner’s God List (WGL) or Anum (after its incipit) was significant enough that it prompted numerous copies. Known exemplars reveal that this list was attested as early as the Ur III period and as late as the Neo-Babylonian period and was geographically widespread, with manuscripts from a range of cities in Babylonia and Assyria, and in more peripheral areas such as Ṭabatum (Tell Ṭaban) and Ugarit (Ras Shamra) in Syria, and Akhetaten (Amarna) in Egypt.
A number of scholars, including Weidner himself, posit that the WGL was a pedagogical text used to train scribes, a hypothesis further bolstered by the relatively recent discovery of the Ṭabatum manuscript, which was written in Old Babylonian by what appears to be an inexperienced scribe or student. The WGL presents a challenge in that the logic behind the order of the deities named is not clear—unlike the list An = Anum, which is ordered more or less hierarchically and by established Götterkreise, it is difficult to understand why the WGL includes certain gods and how they are organized. As Lambert suggests, “at least at the beginning the arrangement of the list is apparently theological. In many places, however, it is difficult to discern the principles of arrangement, if there are any, and it is uncertain if there is even one case of lexical arrangement. Either our knowledge of the deities is inadequate to grasp the basis of the arrangement or, more probably, various short lists have been compiled without any attempt at integrating them.” If the WGL indeed includes several pedagogical exercises, then this would partially explain why the logic behind the list is not clear to us.
Most manuscripts are of the one-column type, comprising one continuous list of divine names; however, a number of Neo-Assyrian exemplars use between two and five subcolumns. The first subcolumn contains the divine name and the following subcolumns contain “the pronunciation of each name, the names of the signs used in each name, and explanatory equivalents (names of equated deities or explanatory phrases).”
VAT 10173 is a first millennium text of the two subcolumn type from Assur and is written in Neo-Assyrian script. The tablet itself is structured in columns, with three columns on each side, although columns IV-V are poorly preserved. Almost nothing is preserved of column VI, and what looks like part of a colophon follows after the final ruling. Each column has a double vertical ruling down the center, which divides the first divine name from the added information. Many entries in the second subcolumn contain the syllabic pronunciation of logograms, ranging from common logographic writings such as utu and its syllabic reading šá-maš (Col. I line 13) to more obscure ones like nagar read as Ištar (iš-tar) (Col. III lines 37-39). Equivalents are also frequent, with one divine name equated to a (typically more familiar) divine name, sometimes grouped into series in which many divine names are equated with the same deity; see, for example, the Nergal subgroup in Col. I lines 26-34. The second subcolumn sometimes explains relationships between the gods, which usually explain female deities, such as dDamgalnunna and dDamkianna as the consorts of Ea in Col. II lines 5-6 and Uttu as the daughter of Anu in Col. III line 41. Non-familial relationships are represented by, for instance, dAlammuš as the vizier of dSîn in Col. I line 13. Epithets are rare, such as Nirah as the lord of the underworld in Col. I line 25 or Laṣ as the Lady of Eridu in Col. III line 21.
VAT 10173 is one of three text fragments from Assur that Frahm has identified as possible commentaries to or expansions of the WGL. Due to the nature of the WGL and other similar god lists (particularly others that have split columns), the generic dividing line between base text and commentary is blurred, however, and the additional column of information could be considered commentary material or could simply align this exemplar more closely with lexical god lists like An = Anum. Thus, VAT 10173 is possibly not strictly a commentary but could rather be another exemplar of the base text. Indeed, Weidner edited this text as exemplar A in his composite reconstruction of the WGL. An edition of the single-column Old Babylonian WGL, including the other exemplars, can be found at http://oracc.org/dcclt/Q003908. The original edition of VAT 10173 was published by Schroeder, who had also done the hand copy, in 1921.
