Note 737 — Chapter VII · THE BABYLONIAN “EVIL DAYS” AND THE SHABATTUM

The text (K. 6012 + K. 10,684) forms a part of the British Museum collection of cuneiform tablets. A portion of the text was published by Rawlinson (op. cit., iii, pl. 56, no. 4) and additions to it, as well as duplicate Babylonian fragments, were subsequently identified by Dr. Pinches, to whom, accordingly, full credit for this important discovery should be ascribed. See T. G. Pinches, “Šapattu, the Babylonian Sabbath,” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, 1904, xxvi, 51-56. H. Zimmern, however, had previously pointed out that, according to the Rawlinson text, the fifteenth day of a thirty-day month might have borne the designation shabattum (Zimmern, in Schrader, Keilinschriften,³ p. 593 n.³); compare his comments on Pinches’s discoveries (Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 1904, lviii, 199-202, 458-460).