Catalogue of the Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, vol. 8.

• Author: Dandamayev, Muhammad

The volume under review is the third and final catalogue of cuneiform tablets excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at Sippar from 1882 to 1895 or acquired by E. A. W. Budge during the same period. One group of texts comes from Tell ed-Der located near Sippar. The principles of description used in the Catalogue have been discussed in my review of the first volume of the series published in this journal (JAOS 108 [1988]; 165-66; see also (JAOS 109[1989]: 289). The book contains an introduction by Walker on the provenance of the various groups of texts and over 12,000 entries which mainly describe Old Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian tablets. The catalogue of the Old Babylonian texts had been prepared by the late J. J. Finkelstein and then revised and completed by Walker. The remaining parts of the book are the work of Leichty.

The majority of tablets are economic and administrative documents from the archives of the Ebabbar temple at Sippar. A few texts come from Babylon, Borsippa, Dilbat, Kish, and Uruk. The collections also contain many astronomical texts, which, in Walker's opinion, probably come from Babylon (p. xiii).

According to my calculations, the total number of Babylonian economic and administrative documents from the first millennium B.C. described in the book is 7,170. Of these, 3,716 are not dated or their dates are lost. By now 1,305 documents annotated in the volume have been published. A total of 3,454 texts are precisely dated to the following kings:

Shamash-shum-ukin 19 Kandalanu 12 Nabopolassar 58 Nebuchadnezzar II 455 Evil-Merodach 35 Neriglissar 92 Labashi-Marduk 5 Nabonidus 1160 Cyrus 306 Cambyses 395 Bardiya 11 Darius 815 Xerxes 25 Artaxerxes 47 (cf. below) Helienistic and Seleucid rulers 19 The following remarks present a few suggestions regarding particular texts. No. 76893 (p. 74), dated in the 26th regnal year of Nabu-[...], can safely be assigned to Nebuchadnezzar II. No. 75322 (p. 31), from the 20th day of the month Abu of Evil-Merodach's accession year, is so far the earliest known document dated in his reign. It was drafted seven weeks earlier than the document which until now has been considered the earliest evidence for his rule (see R. A. Parker and W. H.Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology: 626 B.C.-A.D. 75 [Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1956], 12). No. 75489 (p. 35) was composed on Ayaru 1 of Neriglissar's accession year. This is three months and three weeks before the tablet which until now was known as the...