The Correspondence of Sargon II: Letters from Babylonia and the Eastern Provinces, part III.

• Author: Porter, Barbara Nevling
• Position: Book Review

The Correspondence of Sargon II, part III: Letters from Babylonia and the Eastern Provinces. By ANDREAS FUCHS and SIMO PARPOLA. State Archives of Assyria, vol. 15. Helsinki: HELSINKI UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. lviii + 280, illus. (paper).

The appearance of this volume is a milestone for Assyrian studies. It is an edition of all the Assyrian-dialect letters found at Nineveh written to King Sargon II from Babylonia or from the provinces east of Babylonia. Two volumes of Sargon's correspondence have already been published by the State Archives of Assyria series (Simo Parpola, The Correspondence of Sargon II, part I: Letters from Assyria and the West, 1987; and Giovanni B. Lanfranchi and Simo Parpola, The Correspondence of Sargon II, part II: Letters from the Northern and Northeastern Provinces, 1990). With this volume, the publication of all Sargon's Assyrian-language letters from Nineveh, 955 texts in all, is at last complete, concluding a project on which Simo Parpola has labored for almost forty years. With the subsequent appearance of Manfried Dietrich's edition of the letters to Sargon in Babylonian dialect (The Neo-Babylonian Correspondence of Sargon and Sennacherib, 2003), Assyriologists, historians, and students will at last be able to read and study the letters of one of Assyria's most important kings in reliable transliterations and persuasive and engaging English translations.

This volume will add much to our understanding of Sargon's long struggle to subdue Babylonia and of the efforts of his governors and officials in nearby Assyrian provinces to deal with the political machinations and military efforts of the independent states and tribes to the east. Many of the letters and fragments edited here (260 out of the 391 texts, Parpola notes) have only recently become available even in cuneiform (published by Parpola in CT 53 in 1979); most of these texts are published here for the first time in transliteration and translation. Despite studies of some individual letters, most of the remaining letters were available only in the pioneering but badly flawed early cuneiform edition published beginning in 1892 by Robert Francis Harper (Assyrian and Babylonian Letters, Chicago, 1892-1913) and the equally courageous and unsatisfactory edition by Leroy Waterman based on it (Royal Correspondence of the Assyrian Empire, Ann Arbor, 1930).

Parpola's new edition is therefore a revelation. On a first reading, his clear and sensible translations...