Neo-Sumerian Administrative Tablets from the Yale Babylonian Collection.

• Author: Allred, Lance
• Position: Book review

Neo-Sumerian Administrative Tablets from the Yale Babylonian Collection, Parts One and Two. By MARCEL SIGIUST and TOHRU OZAKI. Biblioteca del Proximo Oriente Antiguo, vols. 6-7. Madrid: CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS, 2009. Pp. 613, 601.

Under the directorship of Manuel Molina, the series Biblioteca del Proximo Oriente Antiguo (BPOA) has now produced nine volumes dedicated to the study of the ancient Near East, including five that focus on Ur III Mesopotamia. Of these, The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration, ed. S. Garfinkle and J. C. Johnson, BPOA 5 (2008), is a collection of contributions to two recent Ur III workshops held at the 49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in London in 2003 and the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Chicago in 2005.

The other four volumes are editions of Ur III cuneiform texts. T Ozalci and M. Sigrist, Ur III Administrative Tablets from the British Museum, Parts One and Two, BPOA 1-2 (2006), include tablets from the British Museum, while the volumes under review here, BPOA 6-7, offer some 3,024 texts that represent approximately one quarter of the more than 12,000 housed at Yale University (p. 9). These volumes are thus a welcome addition to researchers specializing in Mesopotamian history, language, and society at the end of the third millennium, and we hope that the authors will continue this work--as slow and often thankless as it is--in the future.

While part one (BPOA 6, texts 1-1539) includes a short preface to the publication, both parts one and two (BPOA 7, texts 1540-3024) include catalogues that provide pertinent information such as provenance and date, as well as seal information and a summary of each text. Note here some corrections: The catalog entries for BPOA 6 117, 154, 480, BPOA 7 1850, 2005, 2078, 2100, and 2152 (and their respective transliterations) should read [bi.sub.2]-[dug.sub.4] muhaldim in the seal. The catalog entry for BPOA 6 372 indicates that it is sealed by A'akala, the governor of Umma. The text, however, says that the seal is of Lugal-kuzu. BPOA 6 832 incorrectly restores A'alkala for the seal, while the text correctly restores Ur-Lisi.

The texts are generally arranged in numerical order by museum number, so that BPOA 6 1 is YBC 13398, 2 is YBC 13399, 3 is YBC 13400, and so on. However, texts with the siglum NBC (Nies Babylonian Collection) also appear, so that texts BPOA 6 904 and 905 have YBC numbers, but 906 is NBC 182 and 907 is NBC 183. There is no apparent reason for switching from YBC to NBC and back, and often large runs of one siglum will feature an occasional insertion of a text from the other Yale collection.

Because the museum number is related neither to the content of the tablet nor to its provenance, the result is a rather haphazard...