teršītu

Definition

Teršītu (also spelled tersītu / tersitu) is the Akkadian noun meaning roughly "product, preparation, compilation," appearing in the colophons of several Late-Babylonian System A and System B mathematical-astronomy tablets as a procedure-text authorship-or-transmission marker — "teršītu of X," i.e. the prepared/compiled work of scholar X. The same term appears in Late-Babylonian colophons designating the planetary and lunar Ephemerides themselves as compiled outputs.

In Tradition

Hunger and Pingree, following Schnabel (1923), treat the teršītu-attribution as the principal philological evidence for naming the Late-Babylonian inventors of Systems A and B: ACT 122 and 123a are explicitly the teršītu of Kidinnu, and VAT 209 (part of ACT 18) is the teršītu of Nabû-rimannu. The historiographical inference (Kidinnu = inventor of System B; Nabû-rimannu = inventor of System A) is treated as a Schnabel hypothesis grounded in but not exhausted by the colophon attestation.

In Practice

For the student of Babylonian mathematical-astronomy historiography, teršītu names the colophon-formula that supplies the (limited) named-author evidence for the Late-Babylonian procedure-text and ephemeris tradition. Hunger and Pingree present the attestation directly: ACT 122 (for −103/2 to −101/0) and ACT 123a are identified in their colophons as the teršītu of Kidinnu (Greek Κιδηνᾶς), and VAT 209 (in ACT 18) carries the teršītu of Nabû-rimannu. Neugebauer remarks that the phrase "teršītu of Kidinnu" is itself "otherwise a complete puzzle" — the colophon-formula is rare enough that its precise meaning is recoverable only through its concentrated occurrence in System B contexts. The same Akkadian word designates the Ephemerides themselves as compiled tabular outputs of the procedure-text rules. Recognizing teršītu as a procedure-text-and-ephemeris colophon term lets a reader appraise the Schnabel-via-Neugebauer historiographical chain that names Kidinnu and Nabû-rimannu as inventors of their respective lunar-theory systems, while treating the inference as a hypothesis the colophon supports but does not prove.

Historical Origin

Attested in Late-Babylonian Uruk and Babylon procedure-text and ephemeris colophons (roughly 4th-1st c. BCE). Modern critical treatments: Hunger & Pingree, *Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia* (1999), Ch. II §C.2.4-2.5 pp. 266, 282, 288 and §C4.1 pp. 232-233; Neugebauer, *The Exact Sciences in Antiquity* (1957/1969), Ch. V §58 p. 133 and Notes p. 137; Schnabel, *Berossos und die babylonisch-hellenistische Literatur* (Leipzig 1923), as cited by Hunger-Pingree.

Further Reading

• Hermann Hunger & David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia
• Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity