Gadal-iama, Part 4: English Translation

Although many translations and summaries of the contract between Gadal-iama and Rimut-Ninurta have been printed, most of the English ones are based on earlier translations into French or German rather than on the difficult original text. As part of my dissertation I have read this text, and I thought that I should provide a translation too. The following text and translation is based on my poster at Melammu Symposium 10, Societies at War, presented on 27 September 2016 with one or two typos and careless choices of word corrected. I hope that I have not inserted any more mistakes in converting from PDF to HTML.

Note that the word šalṭu, which was understood by Ebeling 1952 and Cardascia 1951 as a “Schild” or “bouclier” and faithfully re-translated by later writers with English “shield”, is now agreed to mean “bow-and-arrow case” (gorytos) because some šalṭū are said to contain large numbers of arrows. The idea that šalṭu meant “shield” was the only basis for translating dêpu parzillu ša šalṭu as “iron boss (umbo) of the shield.”

Further Reading: For a list of earlier translations and commentaries, see part 2 of this series. For an explanation of the un-translated and uncertain words, see my conference poster which cites the most important articles on each problem.

Edit 2019-09-11: Updated the date using MesoCalc by Baptiste Mélès.

Edit 2022-03-18: fixed link broken when WordPress introduced the block editor