The Recent Identification of Bassetki: ancient Mardaman

[us4-he2-gal2]

Recently, as has been reported in the news (BBC and other places), the University of Tübingen has announced that it (more specifically, it's Assyriologists) have identified the ancient name of the site known today as Bassetki. Bassetki is rather the name of a small village, isolated finds from the area have demonstrated for some time that an ancient Mesopotamian site once stood in the vicinity, for example, the famous Bassetki Statue as it is called:

This obscurity of the site and our ignorance of its overall significance has begun to be alleviated thanks to an excavation of the site carried out by Tübingen in 2016. Scholars from this university have subsequently been able to date the settlement in the area to as early as 3000 BC. They also discovered a group of texts from the Middle Assyrian period which have allowed them to identify the site as ancient Mardaman. Mardaman is mentioned with relatively frequency in the Ur III court documents which deal with business in the Upper Mesopotamia / Middle Euphrates area (these texts are discussed to some extent in Sallaberger 2007, "From Urban Culture to Nomadism: A History of Upper Mesopotamia in the Late Third Millennium"). For more news from Tübingen see the below link:

www.uni-tuebingen.de/en/newsfullview-landingpage/article/cuneiform-tablets-from-bassetki-reveal-location-of-ancient-royal-city-of-mardaman.html

[rynathee]

Sounds like an exciting discovery! This made me wonder, what is the typical process in the field for disseminating or publishing newly discovered/translated tablets? Does this process pretty much occur exclusively through universities or museums? How long does it take for new findings to be added to public sites like ETCSL? As an aside - why is academia still using "BC" instead of "BCE"?? (Pet peeve of mine).

I hadn't heard of the Bassetki statue before, was apparently one of the top most wanted items that had been looted from the Iraq Museum during our last invasion. Is said to have stood in a doorway of a palace of Naram-Sin! Pretty cool

www.archaeological.org/pdfs/papers/J_Russell_recovery.pdf