ABSTRACT
In the mid-ninth century BCE, roughly two and a half centuries after Nebuchadnezzar I’s reign had ended, the Babylonian king Nabû-apla-iddina (r. c. 886–855) celebrated the installation of the newly refashioned cult image of the Sun-god Šamaš within the Ebabbar temple at the city of Sippar. 1 The original statue had been destroyed some 200 years earlier in the midst of incursions by the Suteans, a tribal group that made their appearance in Mesopotamia at that time and had begun to plague Babylonia during the reign of Adad-apla-iddina (r. 1068–1047), 2 the eighth king of the Second Dynasty of Isin. The creation of a new statue was only made possible due to the fortuitous discovery of a fired clay model or impression on clay that preserved an image of the god. The man who found this image and brought it to Nabû-apla-iddina’s attention was the šangû-priest of Šamaš, Nabûnādin-šumi. With the king’s patronage, a new statue was fashioned and the proper rites to consecrate it were performed. Nabû-apla-iddina then saw fit to restore to Nabû-nādin-šumi the revenues associated with his position and to re-establish the regular offerings necessary for the full observation of the Šamaš cult at Sippar. To commemorate this event an engraved stone tablet was commissioned that depicted at its top in low relief Nabû-apla-iddina being led into the presence of Šamaš by priests (see Figure 7.1). Beneath that image there was recorded in six columns an account of the events that had led up to the creation of the new statue and a full account of the annual revenues that Nabû-apla-iddina had re-established for Ebabbar. The Sun-god Tablet, as it has come to be known, claimed that all these things had occurred because Šamaš had been angry with Babylonia but had finally relented and had turned his countenance in mercy upon Nabû-apla-iddina. 3 However, the impetus behind the full revival of the Šamaš cult at Sippar undoubtedly came from Nabû-nādin-šumi, who presumably had provided Nabû-apla-iddina with a complete and detailed account of the Šamaš cult’s history since the destruction of the statue recounted in the prologue of the Sun-god Tablet.
