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On the word timmu in Ashurbanipal’s account of the sacking of Thebes by his army

Paper · 2024 · Mattias Karlsson

Summary

Karlsson examines a translation dispute in Ashurbanipal's report of his army's sack of Thebes (664/663 BCE). The text says two timmu were torn from a temple gate and taken to Assyria. Translators disagree on the word. Older versions and some modern ones render it "obelisk," while others choose "column/pillar." The standard dictionaries (CAD, AHw, CDA) list no obelisk sense at all.

The author first surveys the Neo-Assyrian attestations of timmu as a building element, from Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. These usually describe wooden or metal columns set on colossi or bases and carrying architraves. He then tests the Thebes passage against six clues: quantity, height, material, weight, placement and transport.

He concludes that "obelisk" is entirely plausible and possibly the better reading, so dictionaries should add it as a sense. On this view, the Assyrians used a native word because the obelisk's shape was familiar to them. The seizure itself is read as cultural appropriation within Assyria's fascination with Egypt.

Key points

  • The passage is edited as RINAP 5/1, no. 11 (Novotny and Jeffers 2018). Near-identical versions survive in other RINAP 5/1 and 5/2 texts, and some of these write the word as giš tim-me.
  • The monuments are described as:
    • two in number,
    • tall,
    • cast or plated with shiny zaḫalû metal (electrum),
    • weighing 2,500 talents (about 75 tons),
    • standing at a temple gate.
  • Elsewhere in the corpus, timmu refers to columns of wood or metal tied to palace and temple architecture. Only a few Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal texts hint that such columns could stand alone.
  • The weight is light compared with famous obelisks and transport would have been very hard, but neither fact rules out obelisks. Small New Kingdom obelisks existed, the monuments may have been cut into pieces, and the boast may be exaggerated.
  • The Assyrians' own so-called "obelisks," such as the Black Obelisk, are called narû in Akkadian. Of the 21 surviving Egyptian obelisks, 13 are in Rome.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The author settles a disputed sense by checking a fixed list of contextual clues (count, size, material, weight, location, logistics) against each candidate reading, instead of trusting dictionary defaults.
  • I2. He maps a word's sense range by surveying all its attestations across one corpus period and noting the typical companions: bases, architraves, wood or metal.
  • I3. He argues that dictionaries can miss a sense that arises when a native word is stretched to name a foreign object of similar shape.
  • I4. He keeps open the possibility that the narrator's claim does not match reality, separating what the text asserts from what happened.
  • I5. The same English label "obelisk" covers objects that Akkadian distinguishes (timmu for the Egyptian monuments, narû for Assyrian steles), which shows labels and concepts can diverge across languages.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Word-sense choice for a noun could score each candidate sense against the attributes its frame arguments assign, and log which attribute decided the choice.
  • I2 (world): Corpus co-occurrence profiles of this kind could check or extend WordNet senses in the ontology, flagging contexts where no listed sense fits.
  • I3 (world): The ontology could allow a "shape-analogy extension" link, so an unknown foreign artifact attaches to a familiar shape class rather than producing a parse failure.
  • I4 (world): The world model should store boastful or reported events as the speaker's claims with a reliability tag, not as plain facts.
  • I5 (back): Translation through the meta-world should map concepts rather than surface labels, so a single target word does not merge distinct source concepts.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksReligious studies · 209 worksArcheology · 53 works

Cite

Cite as Mattias Karlsson. 2024. On the word timmu in Ashurbanipal’s account of the sacking of Thebes by his army. Orientalia Suecana 73.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.33063/os.v73.590

@inproceedings{karlsson2024word,
  title = {{On the word timmu in Ashurbanipal’s account of the sacking of Thebes by his army}},
  author = {Mattias Karlsson},
  booktitle = {Orientalia Suecana 73},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.33063/os.v73.590},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33063/os.v73.590}
}

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