The Assyriological Seminar presents “Gulkišar, Greatest among Men: a New Akkadian Royal Epic,” a lecture by Elyze Zomer (Leipzig University).
This paper presents a new Akkadian literary text (HS 1885+) from the Hilprecht Collection in Jena, which belongs to the group of so-called ‘royal epics’. In 1959, Von Soden (ZA 53, 231) identified the antagonist king of the main fragment as the last king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, Samsuditana. The protagonist king was first recognized as Gulkišar, sixth king of the First Sealand Dynasty, through two long-distance joins from the University of Pennsylvania. The new synchronism between the two kings will be discussed, with a particular stress on how it affects our understanding of the political landscape of the late Old Babylonian period. Thereafter, the edition of the text itself will be presented and some philological problems examined.