CBS 9800 is the lower half of a large four-column clay tablet artifact that contains a significant portion of "Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld" in Sumerian cuneiform.This artifact contains lines 3-57 (column I), 58-84, 89-113 (column II), 114-167 (column III), and 168-211 (column IV) of the myth.

CBS 9800 may have been renamed as CBS 02198 by the Penn Museum at some point in time, making it seem like CBS 9800 is a different artifact. This tablet was the basis of Samuel N. Kramer's subsequent translations of the myth. The upper half of the tablet is cataloged as Ni. 368 or Nippur 00368 (separately cataloged by Stephen Langdon and Edward Chiera). It is still housed at the Penn Museum.

The large tablet is broken down the middle and contains readable lines of text on the front and back sides (obverse and reverse). The reverse side is mostly destroyed.

Discovery and publication

CBS 9800 was discovered during the Nippur excavations in modern-day Iraq between 1899-1900. Several excavations took place jointly between the University of Pennsylvania and the Ottoman Museum in Turkey. ^[1] The artifacts sat in boxes at the Pennsylvania Museum until Edward Chiera (1885-1933)^[2], a Sumerian scholar who did lots of work on artifacts related to "Inanna's Descent," started publishing pictures of the fragments.

Before passing away in 1933, Chiera was working on publishing his artifact discoveries at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. His work was posthumously published in 1934 in Sumerian Epics and Myths^[3] In this publication were the first images of Ni 368 (plate number 50), one important part that connects to CBS 9800. Because Chiera only published sketches of the artifacts, it would take several years before other scholars would translate what they meant.

In 1937, Samuel Kramer published the first half of "Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld" and explained that "the present publication is made possible by the utilization of CBS 9800, the lower half of a large four-column tablet whose upper half (Ni. 368)... was first published by Langdon."^[4] Kramer clarified that the CBS 9800 part of the tablet was too poorly preserved to be copied.

Importance for "Inanna's Descent"

In 1942, Samuel Kramer published a translation (and collation) of "Inanna's Descent," where the line numbers were carefully mapped out for this artifact.^[5] This publication is referred to as PAPS 85 in citations, short for the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society; however, the journal seems to have gone defunct in 2015.^[6]

Kramer also published a revised translation of these artifacts in 1951 (in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies) as part of his many revisions to the myth's decipherment.^[7] This 1951 version of "Inanna's Descent" would remain as the main version of the myth until William R. Sladek published a revised translation in 1974.