Malgium

Malgium
Malgium is located in Iraq
Malgium
Shown within Iraq
Alternative nameTulūl al-Fāj / Tell Yassir
LocationIraq
Coordinates32°33′41″N 45°6′0″E / 32.56139°N 45.10000°E / 32.56139; 45.10000
Typesettlement
History
PeriodsBronze Age
CulturesOld Babylonian
Site notes
Excavation dates2018
ArchaeologistsAbbas Al-Hussainy
ConditionRuined
OwnershipPublic
Public accessYes

Malgium (also Malkum) (Ĝalgi’a or Ĝalgu’a in Sumerian, and Malgû(m) in Akkadian) is an ancient Mesopotamian city tentatively identified as Tell Yassir (one of a group of tells called collectively Tulūl al-Fāj) which thrived especially in the Middle Bronze Age, ca. 2000 BC - 1600 BC.[1] Malgium formed a small city-state in an area where the edges of the territories controlled by Larsa, Babylon and Elam converged.[2] Inscribed in cuneiform as ma-al-gi-imKI, its chief deities were Ea (whose temple was called Enamtila) and Damkina.[3][4] A temple of Ulmašītum is known to have been there.[5] There was also a temple to the goddess Bēlet-ilī called Ekitusgestu as well as a temple to the god Anum.[1]

  1. ^ a b Douglas Frayne (1990). Old Babylonian Period (2003-1595 BC): Early Periods, Volume 4 (RIM The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia). University of Toronto Press. pp. 668–670.
  2. ^ Trevor Bryce (2009). The Routledge Handbook of The Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia. Routledge. pp. 441–442.
  3. ^ Rients de Boer (2013). "An Early Old Babylonian Archive from the Kingdom of Malgium?". Journal Asiatique. 301 (1): 19–25.
  4. ^ Kutscher, R., "Malgium", RlA 7/3–4, pp. 300–304, 1988
  5. ^ Watanabe, Chikako E., "The symbolic role of animals in Babylon: a contextual approach to the lion, the bull and the mušḫuššu", Iraq, vol. 77, pp. 215–24, 2015