Notes on a new volume of old Assyrian texts.

• Author: Veenhof, Klaas
• Position: Book Review

THIS LARGE, RICH, AND WELL-EDITED volume is an important and most welcome contribution to Old Assyrian studies. The complete and reliable edition, with cuneiform copies, transliterations, translations, notes, and indices, of nearly 350 mostly well-preserved "Kultepe texts" by three specialists in the held, is an important event. It is particularly welcome, because it includes many documents of already well-known traders, some of which have been used, quoted, and edited by Lubor Matous in his many contributions to Old Assyrian. Their full publication now provides much additional data on the activities of their writers and allows a better reconstruction of their archives, which were scattered by local diggers and antiquities dealers. With this volume, a sequel to Matous-Matousova 1984 (KKS), which contains all documents bearing seal impressions, the complete collection of "Kultepe texts" owned by the University of Prague is now available for study. We owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Hecker, who has been involved with this collection for more than twenty years, and to his collaborator Dr. Kryszat for their joint edition of this large collection. They could build on the work already done and left behind after his death in 1984 by Lubor Matous, one of the early specialists in Old Assyrian, to whom this collection had been entrusted for publication and who duly figures as co-author of the volume.

The Prague collection of ca. 420 texts (numbers I 426-847), eight of which are now missing (for a few, transliterations made by L. Matous could be used) and a further nine of which are forgeries, goes back to the archaeological activities of Bedrich Hrozny, who excavated at Kultepe in 1925. Detailed information on their origin is missing, but it is clear that the group comprises both tablets excavated in Kultepe and documents purchased there or elsewhere in Turkey. Evidence for the former are texts which can be joined with those excavated and published in ICK I and II, such as KKS 4 + ICK II 189 + Ka 519; KKS 38 + Ka 630 + ICK II 39; KKS 45b + ICK I 46 + II 76/77; I 513 + ICK II 221; I 579 + ICK II 10 (case); I 588 + (case) ICK II 160 + 162 (case); I 536 duplicates ICK II 145. More examples are now listed by G. Kryszat in Veenhof AV, 268-73. Purchased texts include those belonging to "old" archives, such as that of Pushuken, discovered by local diggers during the first decades of the previous century, and the forgeries.

Due to the nature of the excavations and to the loss of documentation on the find-spots of many tablets (see the remarks in ICK II, 5 and the observations in Larsen 1982), and the lack of information on the origin of those purchased, assigning the Prague tablets to individual archives is an important but difficult task. The introduction to this volume takes an important step in that direction by linking about one hundred and fifty documents with particular traders, families, files, or archives, notably those of Imdilum (at least sixty texts), Innaja (ca. thirty-five texts), and Pushuken (ca. forty texts). This information is supplemented by notes on individual texts, which offer prosopographic information and mention parallel or related documents.

The texts of Pushuken (1) can now be used for a full edition of his correspondence and a study of his business and family firm (also after his death--see below on I 680), a project planned and prepared long ago by the reviewer and to be completed in the near future by J. G. Dercksen. The documents from and about Innaja, son of Elali, are a welcome addition to Michel 1991. The archive of Imdilum, partly excavated by Hrozny, analyzed by Larsen 1982, and reconstructed and edited in Ichisar 1981, is now in need of a completely new reconstruction, which should incorporate not only the new texts from the volume under review, but also those in Istanbul, edited by Donbaz in KTS II (1989), those in Berlin published by the reviewer in VS 26 (1991), and those scattered in various other recent text publications. My remarks will not dwell on problems of archival assignment and reconstruction, since these will be the focus of a forthcoming review by J. G. Dercksen.

The texts are presented in a sequence based not on typology (letters, contracts, judicial records, memos, etc.), prosopography, or archival origin, but on their collection numbers (I 426ff.). This practical solution is debatable, but must have been suggested by the fact that at least sixty of the tablets are already known by their I-numbers (from quotations, in sixteen cases of the complete text of a tablet, mostly by L. Matous). Moreover, any typological and archival arrangement would leave unclassifiable texts and fragments. Since the sealed contracts of the collection were published separately (KKS), those in the volume under review contain only a small number of eponym datings, notably a few memorandums (I 427 and 438) and a dozen debt-notes in the form of tablets without envelopes. (2) The years attested range from no. 78 to no. 133 of the new Old Assyrian Eponym List (Veenhof 2002), with the earliest years in the memorandum I 427 and the latest in I 438: 46 and I 446: 39.

The volume is well organized and nicely printed, and typographical errors are rare (I 440: 26, ma-su; I 639: 1": sa-pi-ik). On plate LXVI the numbers I 531 and 532 should be exchanged. What is shown on pl. XCVII as the damaged reverse of I 642 is ignored on p. 223, but appears on p. 226 as the reverse of I 645, which cannot be true, since this tablet is said to be an "einseitiges Fragment."

In what is primarily a text edition, the interpretative notes to individual texts are understandably selective and usually short. But they contain a lot of welcome prosopographical...