The “Prayer of Nabonidus” (4Q242) from Qumran relates that the Babylonian king Nabonidus was smitten by God with a grievous skin disease for seven years while in Teima. This story recalls the account of Nebuchadnezzar’s bestialization for seven years, as well as the historical incident of Nabonidus’ sojourn in Teima. Consequently, scholars have generally viewed the Prayer of Nabonidus as reflecting an intermediate stage in a nearly unilinear evolution of the tale that eventually found a place in Daniel 4. However, though there are a number of obvious parallels between Daniel 4 and the Prayer, there are also noteworthy differences, the most noticeable one being the difference in the nature of the affliction suffered by the monarch.

Both motifs, Nebuchadnezzar’s bestial behavior and Nabonidus’ skin disease, can be traced back to a Babylonian curse formula which calls upon the moon-god Sîn to inflict a skin disease on the transgressor and make him roam the steppe like a wild ass. The “Uruk Chronicle concerning the Kings of Ur” (SpTU 1, 2), dated to the mid-third century B.C., relates that Šulgi was afflicted with a skin disease in punishment for his sin. A. Cavigneaux considers the passage concerning Šulgi to be a covert allusion to Nabonidus. In this light, it is likely that an account of Nabonidus’ suffering from the curse of the moon-god circulated in Babylonia and was adopted by Jewish authors. This paper proposes that this tradition about Nabonidus’ affliction divided at some point into two branches: one retaining the theme of a skin disease, from which the Prayer of Nabonidus stemmed, and the other concerned with the king’s bestial behavior, which was the origin of the account of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness in Daniel 4.

The Syriac language has several ways of indicating the direct object – by the preposition l-, by an agreement marker on the main verb, or by both. Also, there may be no marker at all. Such a phenomenon is called “Differential Object Marking (DOM)” and can be observed in many languages in the world. In this paper I examine which of the object’s semantic properties control the presence or absence of the object markers. For this study I used the “Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua” as my data source. I noted all the direct objects in that work and analyzed their semantic properties. I took into consideration not only definiteness, which has been suggested in previous studies, but also animacy, which is related to this kind of phenomena in many languages. Through this study, I found that the object markers are used more in cases where the object is in higher position, not only in the definiteness hierarchy (Proper Noun > Definite NP > Indefinite Specific NP > Non-specific NP) but also in the animacy hierarchy (Human > Non-Human Animate > Inanimate). In other words, animacy too is relevant to DOM in Syriac. But at the same time, I noted that the definiteness and animacy of the object noun alone are not enough to explain the conditions under which object markers are used. Thus, we can say that in addition to expanding data, we need to examine other nominal properties, verbal features, and characteristics of sentences in order to determine whether they are relevant or not.

This study is a rereading of two Middle Babylonian documents (UET VII 41–42) with the same textual format. UET VII 41 is written on the topic of the “damage” which the brewers in the temple of Sin in Ur inflicted on Sin-leqi-unninni, in my interpretation, denoting his material loss, i.e., their unpaid debts to him. Also it seems that as a retaliatory measure he stopped supplying them with barley for ginû. When Sin-leqi-unninni made a direct appeal to the king on this matter, in his judgment the king granted his appeal and ordered the brewers to repay their debts, while at the same time probably he ordered Sin-leqi-unninni to resume supplying the barley. The ginû in this document, as in UET VII 47 and 63, seems most likely to mean rations from the temple to the brewers, and Sin-leqi-unninni is known from other sources as a member of the temple personnel engaged in receiving various goods from outside and distributing them inside to the brewers (and others?) for rations and raw materials. The topic of UET VII 42 is the “damage” which Riš-Marduk inflicted on Sin-napšira, i.e., the latter’s material loss. Although it is difficult to understand the text because of the bad state of preservation, I am of the opinion that it is a record of two cases where Riš-Marduk obtained the release of Sin-napšira, a man under restraint, by disposing of the latter’s properties (without his consent?).

Due to new information from the Bactrian documents deciphered and published by Nicholas Sims-Williams, we can now research new subjects that have not previously been studied on the history, geography, and society of Tukhāristān in the pre-Islamic period. In this article, I perform a historical study on the local dominant classes in Tukhāristān by using the fruits of philological study on these Bactrian documents.

The local ruler in Tukhāristān is referred to as khar in the Bactrian documents. In the first chapter, I scrutinized all documents in which khar is mentioned and showed the following possibilities: there were a number of khars in Tukhāristān from region to region and their regional control changed with the times; apart from khar, there was shaho ‘king’ in this region and shaho was gradually replaced by khar; the khar’s jurisdiction corresponded with the largest administrative division, which is referred to as shahro ‘city’ in the documents.

Kharagan, a word derived from khar is frequently mentioned in the documents, which is considered as an epithet for indicating belonging to a family of khar. In the second chapter, I examined local aristocratic classes who bore this epithet and highlighted the following: kharagan would have had private property and would have controlled an administrative division called a lizo ‘citadel’; this characteristic is comparable to a landed class, which is called dehqān in Islamic sources; regarding labirobido, a title meaning ‘chief scribe’ born by a kharagan, one can compare this with an example in a Sogdian document, and this government post would have been of high degree.