Neo-Sumerian Archival Texts in the Nies Babylonian Collection.

• Author: Widell, Magnus
• Position: Book Review

By MARCEL SIGRIST. Catalogue of the Babylonian Collection at Yale, vol. 3. Edited by Ulla Kasten. Bethesda, Md.: CDL PRESS, 2001. Pp. vii + 312. $48.

The book under review represents the third publication of the commendable project of cataloguing the holdings of the Babylonian Collections at Yale, which began in 1988. Earlier volumes in the series Catalogue of the Babylonian Collections at Yale (CBCY) have included the Late Babylonian texts from the Nies Babylonian Collection (P.-A. Beaulieu, vol. 1, 1994) as well as the Old Babylonian archival texts from both the Nies Babylonian Collection (G. Beckman, vol. 2, 1995) and from the Yale Babylonian Collection proper (G. Beckman, vol. 4, 2000). The present publication by Marcel Sigrist is a cat logue of 5172 administrative or economic texts from the Ur III period. All texts in the catalogue come from the Nies Babylonian Collection (siglum NBC). Apart from the accession number, the date and provenience (when possible to assign) as well as a short description is provided for each text. According to the author (p. 1), a more exhaustive electronic catalogue is maintained in the Yale Babylonian Collection and one can only hope that this catalogue will be made available to the public on the web pages of the project,t While most of the texts in the Nies Babylonian Collection have been obtained through purchase and therefore are without any archaeological documentation, the author has been able to attribute most of the texts to their proveniences: Adab: 15; Drehem: 1131; Kes: 64; Kis: 1; Lagas: 130; Lagas or Umma: 2; Nippur: 354; Umma: 3341; Ur: 28; Uruk: 1; Unknown: 105. As for the 64 texts catalogued as being from Kes (possibly modern Tell al-Wilayah (2)), it should be emphasized that the location/locations of the archives of Turam-ili and SI.I-a remains uncertain). (3) 58 of these 64 texts can--with reasonable certainty--be attributed to the merchant Turam-ili's archive(s), while the remaining six texts (NBC 7431, 7502, 7512, 7546, 7738, 9925) can be connected to the business activities of the entrepreneurial shepherd SI.I-a.

The system of dating the texts in the catalogue is well thought out and distinguishes between tablets with unknown, uncertain, illegible, and lost date formulae. It is, however, a pity that the author has chosen not to indicate the date formulae when he has been unable to assign it to the local calendar or to the reign of a ruler. Foreign month names are most important in order...