A Temple Collapses

Novotny, Jamie und Weiershäuser, Frauke (2025): A Temple Collapses. How to Deal with a Religious Crisis in Neo-Babylonian Sippar. In: Pallavidini, Marta; Coppini, Contanza und Bach, Johannes (Hrsg.): Change, Order, Remembrance: Crisis and Religion in the Ancient Near East. Kaison, Bd. 13. Münster: Zaphon. S. 137-160

Abstract

When Nabonidus became king of Babylon, the Šamaš temple called Ebabbar in Sippar (mod. Tell Abu Habbah) was in a lamentable state of repair and it badly needed to be rebuilt despite the fact that Nebuchadnezzar II had worked on that temple only forty-five years earlier. In inscriptions composed in his name, Nabonidus not only described his own renovation of the Ebabbar temple, the sun-god’s “Shining House,” but he also highlighted three “errors” that a “king of the past,” who is sometimes identified as Nebuchadnezzar, had made that led to the “premature” demise of Šamaš’ most important earthly abode. In this article, the authors discuss the alleged “mistakes” that had taken place during Nebuchadnezzar’s reconstruction of Ebabbar that directly resulted in that temple’s collapse and the painstaking efforts that Nabonidus claims to have taken in order to resolve the crisis that resulted from his predecessor’s missteps. The paper will also look at how the Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s behaviour might have served as a model for Nabonidus.

• Dokumententyp: Buchbeitrag
• Keywords: Ebabbar; Esarhaddon; Nabonidus; Nebuchadnezzar II; Sennacherib; Sippar; Šamaš
• Fakultät: Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften > Historisches Seminar > Alte Geschichte ; Kulturwissenschaften > Department für Kulturwissenschaften und Altertumskunde > Assyriologie und Hethitologie
• Themengebiete: 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 900 Geschichte ; 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 930 Geschichte des Altertums (bis ca. 499), Archäologie
• ISBN: 978-3-96327-294-3 ; 978-3-96327-295-0
• Ort: Münster
• Sprache: Englisch