RT Article
T1 Akkadian Terms for Streets and the Topography of Mesopotamian Cities
JF Altorientalische Forschungen
VO 38
IS 2
SP 309
OP 347
A1 Steinert, Ulrike
LA German
PB De Gruyter
YR 2011
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1801474540
AB Archaeological data on streets and open spaces in Mesopotamian cities and thus present knowledge about the layout of urban street networks are still rather limited. The textual sources, on the other hand, although offering much information on topographic features, often provide insufficient clues to identify these with certainty on the ground, due to a lack either of specificity or of archaeological information. In the first section of this article, the Akkadian vocabulary for city streets will be discussed, concentrating on the semantics of the term ribītu . Textual examples from the 2 nd to the 1 st millennium BC will be presented, pointing to the polysemy of the word ribītu , meaning both ‘broad street’ and ‘(open) space’, but also to the development of more extended meanings, such as ‘district’ and ‘circumference’. The polysemy of ribītu can be correlated with a lack of other words for public ‘open space’ (‘square’) in Akkadian. In a second part, archaeological evidence for streets and open spaces in Mesopotamian cities will be presented, and it is suggested that this evidence accords with the Akkadian terminology.
K1 ribītu
K1 public urban space
K1 open spaces
K1 street
K1 City
DO 10.1524/aofo.2011.0020