Death Formulae and the Burial Place 249 the royal court (22). The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur (late third-early second millennium BCE) were probably buried in their residential palace, and the ‘Mausolea’ excavated by Woolley was probably a cult place for the dead kings (23). A corbel-vaulted royal tomb was discovered under the palace of Ras Shamra/Ugarit (24). Adler suggested that the 14th Century ‘Schatzhaus’ unearthed at Kamid el-Loz (Kumidi) was originally a royal grave and that other second millennium royal tombs located in or near the palace were discovered at Alalakh, Tel Mardikh (Ebla), Byblos and Megiddo (Stratum VIIA) (25). Other suggested evidence for royal burials in palace remains uncertain (26). Descriptions of the death of kings are found sporadically in cuneiform documents (27), but the place of burial is never mentioned. An exception is a Babylonian chronicle (called “the Dynastic Chronicle”) that records the burial place of six Babylonian kings of the late eleventh-early tenth century BCE (28). Five of them were buried in the palaces of Sargon (29), or K˝r- Marduk; the sixth was buried in the swamp of Bit-Hashmar, near his homeland, possibly an unworthy burial place for a king. The above makes it clear that the practice of burying kings in their ‘houses’, namely their palaces, conceived as places of dwelling and rest in life and after-life, was widespread all over the ancient Near East (30). This supports the assumption that the kings of the House of David were also buried in the royal palace. As noted above, the later kings of Judah were buried in a new place (the garden of Uzza), whose location must be clarified. According to Neh 3,15-16, the segment of the city wall that included the Fountain Gate and ‘the wall of the Pool of Shelah of the King’s Garden’ was (22) M.S.B. DAMERJI, “Gräber Assyrischer Königinnen aus Nimrud”, Jahrbuch des Römischen-Germanischen Zentralmuseums 45 (1998) 19-84. (23) P.R.S. MOOREY, “Where did They Bury the Kings of the IIIrd Dynasty of Ur?”, Iraq 46 (1984) 1-18. (24) F.A. SCHAFFER, “Reprise des recherches archéologiques à Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Sondages de 1948 et 1949 et campagne de 1950”, Syria 28 (1951) 14-17; MOOREY, “IIIrd Dynasty of Ur”, 16. (25) W. ADLER, K˝mid el-L˛z, 11. Das ‘Shatzhaus’ im Palastbereich. Die Befunde des Königsgrabes (Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 47; Bonn 1994) 126-148; see R. HACHMANN (ed.), K˝mid el-L˛z, 16. ‘Shatzhaus’-Studien (Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 59; Bonn 1996) 208-264. (26) MOOREY, “IIIrd Dynasty of Ur”, 15-16; see Y.M. AL-KHALESI, “The b^t kispim in Mesopotamian Architecture: Studies of Form and Function”, Mesopotamia 12 (1977) 59-81. (27) For a detailed treatment, see W.W. Hallo, “The Death of Kings: Traditional Historiography in Contextual Perspective”, Ah, Assyria … Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor (eds. M. COGAN – I. EPH‘AL) (Jerusalem 1991) 157-159. (28) A.K. GRAYSON, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (Locust Valley 1975) 41-42, 142-143. (29) Whether the custom of burying kings in the palace already existed in Akkad under Sargon’s dynasty, as might be inferred from this reference, remains uncertain. See P. MICHALOWSKI, “The Death of ∏ulgi”, Orientalia 46 (1977) 220 n. 3; MOOREY, “IIIrd Dy- nasty of Ur”, 15 (30) M. NOVÁK, “Das ‘Haus der Totenpflege’. Zur Sepulkralsymbolik des Hauses im Alten Mesopotamien”, Altorientalische Forschungen 27 (2000) 132-154. Novák suggested that the concept of the house as dwelling and resting place for its inhabitants explains the imitation of palaces in burial places erected on cliffs and in the plain.