electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, “Astronomical diary for year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar II (ADART I, Diary No. -567), obverse line 1”
“Year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Month I, (the 1st of which was identical with) the 30th (of the preceding month), the moon became visible behind the Bull of Heaven”
The opening line of the tablet, which fixes the whole set of observations that follow to a named king's named regnal year. The eBL record gives the holding museum as the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the find-site as Babylon, the CDLI number as P421595, and the edition as Sachs and Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, Volume I: Diaries from 652 B.C. to 262 B.C. (1988), pp. 46-53, No. -567.
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Provenance and verification note for electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, Astronomical diary for year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar II (ADART I, Diary No. -567), obverse line 1
Confidence note. The eBL public API record for VAT.4956 was downloaded on 19 September 2026 and the transliteration and English translation read line by line. The eBL viewer page itself is a JavaScript application and returned no text to an automated fetch; the API returns the same edition as structured data.
Scan provenance. electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen. The edition reproduced there is that of Sachs and Hunger, digitised by Reinhard Pirngruber for the Astronomical Diaries Digital project (Austrian Academy of Sciences), CC BY-SA 3.0.
Corroborated by. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p30-37th-year, src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-year-numbers
Notes. The eBL designation 'Diary No. -567' uses the astronomical year numbering in which -567 is 568 BCE.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-line1