![]() But even when adopting a more cultural-relativistic stance-to put things broadly-, it remains difficult to delineate the contours of Mesopotamian historiography, perhaps because the exercise is inevitably informed by outside categories. ![]() The contents, form, sources used, and intentions of writing of each of them are evaluated, and, their differences notwithstanding, a number of shared themes and approaches are identified and proposed as elements of Neo-Babylonian national history writing in Babylonia.Īpplying modern categories to an ancient reality has been decried, and justly so, as highly problematic from the early days of cuneiform research, although certainly with varying degrees of conviction. In order to do so, three roughly contemporary sources, different in style and tone but all probably written in the late seventh/early sixth century, are discussed as instances of this phenomenon: the Chronicle of Ancient Kings A, the Chronicle Concerning the Early Years of Nebuchadnezzar II, and the Imgur-Enlil Inscription of Nabopolassar. This article explores aspects of this question by examining how, in the wake of political, intellectual, and cultural developments which marked the late second and the beginning of the first millennium BCE, various streams of historiographic practice co-existed and partly converged towards the writing of a Babylonian national history, or rather, national histories. ![]() ![]() Any discussion about historiography in Mesopotamia leads sooner or later-and it is usually sooner-to the question of genre (e.g., Michalowski 1999). ![]()
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