A reading, published with its checks still open. A Vigslist translation.
The Installation of the Nu-eš₃ Priest — a bilingual consecration ritual. Akkadian lines give the actions, Sumerian lines the spoken words; Asalluhi casts the incantation, the candidate is brought out, made pure, made bright, and the evil tongue is ordered to stand aside. The Nippur ancestor of the consecration the program published from K.2437+.
Published as a reading. No first-translation claim is made for this piece. The checks that would settle such a claim are named in the notes below and are still open; the wording on this page claims nothing they have not settled.
Status: BUILT — witness reading, fragments class · claim: none — English rendering of this tablet's preserved lines on present evidence, doors named below · built 2026-10-22 by the overnight B3 Ni number-space sweep (record in neither program census; found by direct probing of the Ni number space on eBL).
The piece: Ni 2293 · Istanbul Museum (Nippur) · Old Babylonian · no CDLI number on the record · no hand copy cited on the record · transliteration: Jeremiah Peterson (eBL, 2022-09-27) · 0 #tr.en · 12 line-units · genre as classified on the record itself: Canonical / Magic — "Consecration of a Priest." The record's note names the rite: "installation of the nu-eš₃ priest (Borger BiOr 30)."
A bilingual ritual for installing the nu-eš₃, the purification priest. The tablet alternates its two voices the way these rites do: Akkadian lines give the actions — cloth purified in pure water, a thing entrusted to the fuller of the land, hands kept pure — and Sumerian lines give the spoken words that ride on the actions. At the end the voice changes key: Asalluhi himself casts the incantation, the candidate is brought out, made pure, made bright, and the evil tongue is ordered to stand aside.
This is the Old Babylonian Nippur ancestor of the ritual family the program has already published from the first millennium — the consecration of an Enlil priest (K.2437+). Kinship of genre is claimed, not identity of text: no line of Ni 2293 is a line of that tablet, and none is rendered as if it were.
Standing of the text, stated plainly: the composition's distinctive strings — asal-lu₂-hi nam-šub, eme-hul-gal₂ bar-še₃, aš-la-ku ša — and even the bare word-forms nu-eš₃ / nu-eš occur zero times in the 86.9 MB local CDLI ATF export (checked string by string, 2026-10-22; the export's sign encodings vary, and the check is reported as run). No edition, translation, or discussion of this tablet was found beyond the record's own note, which points to Borger's discussion in Bibliotheca Orientalis 30 (1973) — a German discussion, named here as the door it is, not read as an Englishing. An uncurated trace (Geller, BSOAS 63 (2000), p. 3, on first-millennium Nimrud fragments of the same ritual world) is likewise named, not conflated. Visual layer: not consulted. Dragon scan: the ATF as served carries no dragon or serpent wording.
The preserved text is a single column of twelve lines, line-heads lost on the first. Akkadian lines are the rite's stage directions; Sumerian lines its spoken words.
Notes on the words: bar-si (Akkadian parṣīgu) is the priest's headcloth, the garment this rite keeps returning to — purified, set apart, purified again. The azlag (Akkadian ašlaku), "the fuller of the Land," is the washerman of the temple household, the officer whose trade is clean cloth; the rite entrusts the candidate's gear to him. šu-luh, the hand-washing, is the purification act that gives the nu-eš₃ his working purity. nam-šub is the incantation proper, and its caster is named: Asalluhi, the exorcist-god of Eridu, whose speaking drives out the eme-hul-gal₂, the "evil tongue" — slander and curse spoken against the man being installed, ordered off the ground before he takes office.
Rendered 12 of 12 line-units — 4 whole / 6 part / 2 fragment / 0 invented. The whole lines are the rite's load-bearing clauses: the entrusting to the fuller, the purifying of the headcloth, Asalluhi's casting, and the triple bringing-out — out, pure, bright.
Gates run: zero #tr.en on the record; no EDITION or DISCUSSION reference typed on the record (its bibliography is the Borger note alone); the tablet's distinctive strings unattested in the local corpus on six independent checks. Doors: Borger, BiOr 30 (1973), eyeball in the print-check wave; the first-millennium priest-installation editions (the later copies of this ritual family) to be checked against these twelve lines in the same wave; collation against a photograph or copy if one surfaces — the record cites neither.
Built from the eBL fragment record Ni.2293 (fetched 2026-10-22). Transliteration © Jeremiah Peterson / the eBL project. English rendering of this witness's preserved lines: Vigslist translations — AI-assisted, cross-checked against the transliteration as served.
Nuvira Technologies conducts this research with AI assistance, cross-verified against the primary sources to scholarly integrity standards. Uncertain readings are marked; broken lines are left broken.
— Richard Vigslist, Founder, Nuvira Technologies
More antiquities research: Antiquities Research