Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, part II: Assurbanipal through Sin-sharru-ishkun.

• Author: Melville, Sarah C.
• Position: Book Review

Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, part II: Assurbanipal through Sin-sharru-ishkun. By RAIJA MATTILA. State Archives of Assyria, vol. 14. Helsinki: HELSINKI UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. xxix + 381, illus.

This volume completes the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project's publication of the private legal records from Nineveh begun in Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, part I: Tiglathpileser III through Esarhaddon by S. Parpola and T. Kwasman (SAA 6). It includes, in addition to the remainder of texts assigned to Ashurbanipal's reign, all of the texts dated by post-canonical eponyms along with those documents that cannot be assigned with certainty to any reign. (The Remanni-Adad archive, which begins during Esarhaddon's reign and continues into Ashurbanipal's, was included in part I in order to make the length of each volume comparable.)

Although virtually all of the texts included have been published previously, first by C. H. W. Johns, Assyrian Deeds and Documents I-II (Cambridge, 1898-1923) (ADD), by J. Kohler and A. Ungand, Assyrische Rechtsurkunden (Leipzig, 1913) (ARU), and more recently by T. Kwasman, Neo-Assyrian Documents in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum (Rome, 1988) (NALK), they have since been subjected to repeated collation by Parpola, Baker, and Mattila among others, and as a result, contain many new readings and corrections. The decision to include post-canonical private texts found at the Shamash gate in Nineveh (and hence not, strictly speaking, of the "royal court") should be applauded, since the original publication of those texts, J. N. Postgate and B. K. Isma'il, Texts from Nineveh (Baghdad, 1979), is not readily available.

Mattila organizes the texts in the volume chronologically by individual dossier wherever possible, a system that naturally follows the structure employed by the editors of the earlier volume. She has managed to arrange these disparate and often fragmentary documents coherently, and for this alone deserves our enthusiastic accolades. By classifying texts according to the principal's most specific title, Mattila is simply following the precedent set in SAA 6, but inevitably some of the resulting headings are misleading. For example, eleven texts are collected under the heading "officials of the Crown Prince" (nos. 23-33), because the three principal agents of these transactions are each once identified with a title connecting them to the mar sarri. This means that...