Die altassyrischen Privaturkunden.

• Author: Veenhof, Klaas R.
• Position: Review

By ANDREA MARIA ULSHOFER. Freiburger altorientalische Studien, Beihefte: Altassyrische Texte und Untersuchungen, vol. 4. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1996. Pp. 503. DM 186.

Before the start of the Turkish excavations in 1948, the ruins of the ancient Anatolian city of Kanish (modern Kultepe) had already yielded an estimated forty-five hundred cuneiform tablets. About a thousand were excavated in 1925 by B. Hrozny, the rest had been dug up by local villagers and were acquired, through dealers, by a great number of museums and collectors. They are the scattered remains of perhaps fifteen to twenty archives of Assyrian traders settled in the commercial quarter (Assyrian karum) of the lower town, during the twentieth and nineteenth centuries B.C. (level II of the karum). The many letters and legal documents (a variety of contracts and judicial records) among these texts readily lend themselves to a reconstruction of the commercial activities and archives of their owners, since they mention writers, addressees, or parties to contracts and in legal conflicts. But a third category, the short notes, memorandums, lists, private bookings, accounts, and a variety of excerpts or abstracts of formal records, about twenty percent of the texts, presents problems of classification and interpretation. The name given to them by A. Ulshofer, "Privaturkunden," could lead to misunderstanding because almost all records from karum Kanish are documents written by and for private persons and kept in private archives. These texts are mostly anonymous, not mentioning the name of their writers or owners. When they are not simply lists of people, goods, claims, they frequently use verbal forms in the first person singular or plural ("I gave, received, paid, entrusted, collected, owe . . .," etc.) which leaves us to guess who is speaking. Being private records, without legal or evidentiary force, they lack seal-impressions, which also deprives us of evidence on the persons involved. Nevertheless, they contain a lot of information on a variety of aspects of the trade, on trade goods, transport, travel expenses, deposit, investment, profit, accounting, with at times long lists of debtors, personnel(?), goods in store or outstanding, silver and gold shipped back to Assur, not to mention lists of household goods, animals, and of distributions of bread, drinks, and gifts.

The book under review (henceforth, APU) offers a full edition of more than six hundred texts of this type, in transliteration and translation, with summaries and short notes, preceded by a more general introduction to this type of record. They are classified in twelve groups on the basis of form and contents. A glossary to the volume will appear later. The publication of such a large body of texts is no small achievement and the author deserves our gratitude for making them easily available in a generally reliable edition. Many of the texts were collated and many new readings and restorations of broken passages are proposed. Unfortunately, the ca. one hundred and twenty "Privaturkunden" kept in Istanbul and published in the volumes ICK 1 and 2 and KTS 1 and 2, were not collated, although publications by V. Donbaz (confirmed by my own experience) show that collations are necessary and rewarding.

I have some reservations about the classification of these generally less formal and highly variable records and hence about their grouping and sequential ordering, which at times fails to bring together what is really related by form, contents, or archival background. I will not dwell on this point and refer to my observations in a review in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997): 301-4. I also question the author's decision to include all texts which in her view qualify as "Privaturkunden," because I believe that their formal characteristics in many cases do not warrant a separate edition, as could be defended for the more formal legal records (edited between 1930 and 1935 in the still valuable volumes of G. Eisser and J. Lewy, Die altassyrischen Rechtsurkunden vom Kultepe, MVAeG, vols. 33 and 35.3 [Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich]). Several groups, moreover, have been edited in the recent past with a discussion of their contents and background, such as those dealing with travel expenses to be apportioned over the participants of a caravan (in Kh. Nashef, Rekonstruktion der Reiserouten zur Zeit der altassyrischen Handelsniederlassungen [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987]) and those dealing with the business of two traders called Innaya (in C. Michel, Innaya dans les tablettes paleo-assyriennes, I-II [Paris: ERC, 1991]). The records...