Adab - Definition and Overview

The city of Adab (modern site Bismaya), between Telloh and Nippur (modern-day Iraq), was important in the Ur III period but declined afterwards. Adab "suffered a short and not very successful excavation" by Edgar James Banks in 1903/04 in the words of A. Leo Oppenheim. The dig was sponsored by the Oriental Exploration Fund of the University of Chicago, but Banks later sold cuneiform tablets from the site to private collections. Fewer than fifty texts — scattered from Yale to California to Istanbul — have been published from this early site.

A king of Adab in an early Sumerian king list, and a mention of the city in the law code of Hammurapi await the publication of the cuneiform tablets found at the site. In the meantime, there is a Sumerian comic tale of the three ox-drivers of Adab.

See Also

• Kitab al-I'tibar, the autobiography of Usamah ibn Munqidh

External link

• "three ox-drivers from Adab" (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr565.htm)
• Edgar James Banks, Bismaya: or the lost City of Adab, 1912 (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/eos/eos_title.pl?callnum=DS70.B2) (E-text)