Colophon (cuneiform tablet)

Definition

A colophon is the closing notation of a cuneiform tablet, conventionally placed at the lower-left corner of the reverse, recording the tablet's place within a numbered series, the name of the scribe or owner, the date of writing, and where applicable a secrecy-marker (niṣirtu or piriştu) restricting circulation. Modern Assyriology uses the colophon as the principal philological apparatus for dating, locating, and classifying cuneiform tablets — both the mathematical-astronomy tablets of ACT and the omen, ritual, and lexical tablets of the broader scholastic corpus.

In Tradition

Neugebauer treats the colophon as a structural feature that fixes a tablet's position in its series and signals the internal segmentation of its contents. Rochberg and Brown both anchor scholarly-secrecy claims in colophon-vocabulary: the niṣirtu / piriştu pair marks restricted material, while teršītu in ACT and System B colophons signals authorship attribution.

In Practice

For the student of how Babylonian celestial knowledge was transmitted, the colophon is the load-bearing piece of metadata. Neugebauer used the lower-left-corner note on a problem tablet — reading dub-13-kam-ma, "13th tablet" — to establish that the text belonged to a series of at least thirteen related tablets, and the same colophon resolved the internal structure (problems only, solutions on companion tablets). On ACT 122 + 123a, the colophon identifies the tablet as the teršītu of Kidinnu; on VAT 209 it identifies the teršītu of Nabû-rimannu — the historiographical basis for naming Kidinnu and Nabû-rimannu as inventors of System B and System A respectively. Colophons also record mixed numerical conventions: Neugebauer notes that a tablet containing hundreds of sexagesimal numbers may date itself non-sexagesimally (year written 2-me-25 rather than 3,45), evidence that sexagesimal was confined to strictly mathematical or astronomical contexts.

Historical Origin

Attested in cuneiform colophons from Old Babylonian through the Seleucid period; the ACT colophons concentrate in Late Babylonian Uruk and Babylon (c. 4th-1st c. BCE). Modern critical treatments: Neugebauer, *The Exact Sciences in Antiquity* (1957/1969), Ch. III §33 p. 63 and Ch. I §13 p. 17; Hunger & Pingree, *Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia* (1999), §C4.1 pp. 232-233; Rochberg, *The Heavenly Writing* (2004), Ch. 6 §6.1.

Further Reading

• Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity
• Hermann Hunger & David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia
• Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture