The Babylonian Correspondence of Sargon and Sennacherib.

• Author: Kravitz, Kathryn F.
• Position: Book review

The Babylonian Correspondence of Sargon and Sennacherib. By MANFRIED DIETRICH. Translated by Inka Parpola and Ronald Mayer-Opificius. State Archives of Assyria, vol. 17. Helsinki: HELSINKI UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. xlv + 214, illus. (paper).

The present volume contains 207 letters from the Kuyunjik collection of Neo-Babylonian letters that the author has assigned to the reigns of Sargon II and Sennacherib. Originally compiled in the 1960s, the work includes ninety-one texts from the edition of Robert Harper (Assyrian and Babylonian Letters [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1892-1914]) and 114 from the author's own Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, Part 54 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1979). Those letters from the Harper collection have been compared to the original clay tablets and sometimes considerably corrected; the texts published in 1979 have been repeatedly collated.

The letters are arranged in groups according to place of origin, but Dietrich also supplies an overview of the letters listed by reign and within each reign, by sender, with dates appended where possible (pp. xxxv-xxxvii). Included in the introduction is a set of comments on each group of letters: these provide some identification of the sender and his role, some background for the letter's contents, and evidence for Dietrich's assignment of the letter to one king or the other. Since many of the letters are quite broken, these comments are very helpful; they also provide references to supporting documentation as well as to interpretations that differ from those presented.

Dietrich carefully lays out his method for assigning letters to either Sargon or Sennacherib, an undertaking both complex and exacting since dates as well as the name of the king being addressed are frequently missing. When a letter can be reliably assigned, either by the name of the addressee or the sender or by an identifiable historical event, it can then serve as a starting-point to identifying markers such as style, scribal idiosyncrasies, or ductus. Using these markers, Dietrich assigns 126 letters to Sargon with "great certainty."

Dietrich dates over half of Sargon's letters to 710-709. that is, to the events of the campaign to unseat Merodach-Baladan and bring Babylonia under Assyrian control. The texts reflect the wide variety of issues that arise when a government is in the process of being overthrown: thus, temple officials in Babylon plead with Sargon to ignore the advice...