Imperial and Administrative Records, part I: Palace and Temple Administration.

• Author: Porter, Barbara Nevling

Being an Assyrian specialist is often like working a huge jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces are missing and others somewhat mashed. Occasionally a box of new pieces arrives in the mail, filling in gaps, making it clear that some pieces don't really fit where you thought they did, and providing tantalizing glimpses of what the finished puzzle may someday look like. Since 1985, the State Archives of Assyria project has been one of the most regular providers of such boxes of puzzle pieces, and the present volume in this series, an edition of administrative records from the palaces at Nineveh, is one of the most intriguing collections of puzzle pieces to arrive in years.

This is a book of lists - lists of textiles, lists of precious objects, lists of debtors, lists of professional people and of officials - and it poses some daunting problems. Since the lists usually lack explanatory labels, names of authors, and dates, it is often unclear how the apparently disparate objects or people appearing in a particular list were related, who made the list and for what purpose, or even when and where the list was compiled. To make matters more complicated, most of the texts were discovered during early excavations at Nineveh, at which time no precise records were made of findspots for tablets, so no provenance is immediately clear; nor is it known whether they were found in small groups which might represent the archives of a particular official or office, or in a widely assorted collection of tablets.

One of the major contributions of the editors of this volume, F. M. Fales and J. N. Postgate, is the reasonable and convincing proposals they offer for resolving many of these questions, most of them presented in Postgate's excellent introduction. Accepting the earlier arguments of J. E. Reade and S. Parpola that texts beating these British Museum numbers were probably excavated in the Southwest Palace at Nineveh, many of them together in a single suite of rooms, Fales and Postgate make a good case for concluding that the texts presented here represent the archives of administrators based in the Southwest Palace. They also argue convincingly that the texts date primarily from the seventh-century reigns of Esarhaddon and Asurbanipal, except for a few documents from Sargon's reign, apparently preserved in the files of a later administrator.

While many of Nineveh's administrative records were probably kept on wooden writing boards or parchment that have...