An initiative dedicated to further the standardisation of metadata entities and associated vocabularies in cuneiform studies.
View the Project on GitHub cdli-gh/glow_vocabularies
Chronology Working Group
Émilie Pagé-Perron, Jamie Novotny, Heather Baker, Bertrand Lafont, Damien Agut-Labordere, Bruno Gombert, Mirko Novak, and David Danzig
To set and record a date and chronological lists of dates, the “year names” system attributes a “name” to a given year, making reference to an official event that occurred during the previous year of a king’s reign (e.g., a military victory, the foundation of a religious establishment, etc.). This dating method was common during the Old Akkadian, Ur III, and Old Babylonian periods.
From the Early Dynastic period, ca. 2400 BC, Babylonian scribes began to qualify administrative and legal texts with notations clearly identifiable as date notations. Scribes used three different systems for defining a given year: year names, eponyms and counting the years. The “year names” system attributes a “name” to a year, making reference to an official event. Thus, each year of a reign is designated by a formula relating an event that most often occurred the previous year and that glorifies the highlights of the reigning king: a military victory, a construction work or an act of piety; usually the name of the year is then constructed as follows: “Year: RN + built/conquered/established + object”. But this formula can be more developed, sometimes with variants, or on the contrary abbreviated. The name of the first year of a reign usually records the king’s accession to the throne: “year: RN became king”. This method of dating was common during the Old Akkadian, Ur III, and Old Babylonian periods.
Between the Old Akkadian and the end of the Old Babylonian periods, the system of year-names plays a central role in establishing chronology, both absolute and relative. The first task of researchers is to try to put in chronological order the year names of a documented reign, from its first to its last year, a sometimes arduous task which is far from being completed today.
For some rulers, we have documents that recapitulate the list of their year names, but this is far from being the most frequent situation. We also sometimes have lists of sovereigns or dynasties providing the name of a king, the length of his reign and his ancestry, which of course also helps to establish a chronology in connection with year names.
For the Old Babylonian period (1st half of the 2nd millennium BC), the questions relating to the synchronisms between the many attested dynasties are the most crucial for establishing the chronology, whether relative or absolute. During the 18th century BC, the length of certain main contemporary reigns, such as those of Samsi-Addu (Ekallatum), Rim-Sin (Larsa) or Hammurabi (Babylon), complicates in this respect the task of the historian. This system of year names also has the great interest of sometimes mentioning events that are ignored by the rest of the contemporary documentation and it helps greatly, once the year names are in order, to write the political history of a reign.
Although ideally we would offer the year name as it appears in the text, it’s link to a composite year bame and also the actual year identification based on the name as possible, scholars usually store the year name using it’s interpretation in the form of the ruler name and the regnal year of that ruler, based on external mapping of year names with their corresponding ruler and regnal year (see the resources section).
In the case where the ruler cannot be identified, the dynasty should be given.
Other associated fields are “periods”, “dynasties”, “rulers”, “eponyms”, and “dates”.
Whatever the project, the mode of recording and displaying the year names generally starts from the widest chronological range and goes to the narrowest. The following hierarchy is thus almost always found: period / dynasty / ruler / year name / month / day. This is the system adopted for example by ORACC and CDLI..
See the very simple presentation mode adopted by cdli:wiki: https://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=year_names
To search for a date, the most explicit model is given by the ad hoc window on the website of the Archibab project: http://www.archibab.fr/4DCGI/recherche11.htm
https://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=year_names
https://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=year_names https://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/yearnames/yn_index.html
http://www.archibab.fr/4DCGI/recherche11.htm https://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/yearnames/yn_index.html https://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=year_names
- Bertrand Lafont, Émilie Pagé-Perron