This well-preserved portrait-oriented tablet, now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, contains a previously unpublished cola-type commentary on Tablets 5 and 16 of the celestial omen manual, Enūma Anu Enlil.
The text begins by quoting the entire protasis that is partially preserved in the opening line of a manuscript of EAE from Nineveh, edited as source a of Tablet 5 by Verderame. The same protasis is cited after a single ruling on the reverse (l. 32), thereby indicating that it is the incipit of Tablet 5 of EAE. Many of the explanations begin by designating the day of the month to which the base text refers. Since some of the protases are incompatible with the designated days (see the notes ad ll. 9 and 14), it is unclear what the commentator is trying to achieve by associating the protases with these specific days. In ll. 11-14, the commentator is clearly trying to render an unintelligible text intelligible by explaining several words not easily associated with the appearance of the moon, e.g. “downtrodden,” as meaning “eclipse.” The omen “If its horns are full of protuberances,” which is treated in l. 15, also appears in CCP 3.1.5.A (l. 14), where it is explained differently.
Lines 33-40 contain a short commentary on Tablet 16 of EAE. Some of the protases it comments on are the same as some of those commented on in CCP 3.1.16 (see the notes to ll. 36-39 of the present text), and the section concludes with the incipit of EAE 16, which is squeezed into the end of a line of commentary. A three-line colophon follows, in which the scribe is identified as “Zēr-kitti-<līšir>, nêšakku-priest of Enlil, son of Aplāya, nêšakku-priest of Enlil, [desce]ndant of Gimil-Sîn, the Sumerian.” He may be identical to the homonymous father of the scribe of CCP 4.2.M.a (a commentary on the therapeutic medical series Qutāru). After the colophon, the present text ends with a four-line prayer to Nabû, which has been published and discussed by Frahm.
To date, eleven tablets containing text commentaries (including this one) can be identified with more or less certainty as written by and belonging to members of the Gimil-Sîn family, who, since they are often priests of Enlil, were based in Nippur. Although the tablets associated with the descendants of Gimil-Sîn were probably produced in that city, all five that were found during controlled excavations come from Uruk. Consequently, this particular tablet may have been found at Uruk, or even at Babylon or Sippar – cities where some of the six other tablets containing text commentaries written by members of the Gimil-Sîn family may have been found.
This tablet’s colophon does not contain a date, and neither the scribe nor his father are attested in administrative documents. As a result, the date of the tablet’s production is uncertain. However, since three text commentary manuscripts produced by members of two other Nippurean families can be dated to the Persian period, this time span is the likeliest approximate date of this tablet and others belonging to members of the Gimil-Sîn family.
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