The Shemshara Archives, 2: The Administrative Texts.

• Author: Mieroop, Marc Van de

The history of northern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium B.C. is currently a flourishing topic of research: the Habur triangle, the heartland of Samsi-Addu's state, is, in archaeological terms, one of the most intensively investigated areas in the Near East, and the textual sources are rapidly growing in size and accessibility to scholarship, especially through the efforts of the Mari and Tell Leilan expeditions and their epigraphic teams. It is thus opportune that tablets from the eastern frontier of this area, excavated some thirty-five years ago by Danish and Iraqi archaeologists, are published at this time. The work is by Jesper Eidem, who has also worked on tablets from Rimah, Leilan, and Mari, and is thus eminently qualified to undertake the task.

The core of this book is the editio princeps of the administrative tablets and fragments found in two loci and two different seasons at the site. The catalogue includes 146 numbers, but one fragment belongs to a letter (106), one tablet contains a multiplication table (90), and one could not be found (56). The attention paid to each document in the catalogue seemingly depends on the state of preservation. A small number of texts are provided with a summary description of their contents, transliteration, translation, and some philological notes. Many are given a description with a complete or partial transliteration, some merely a short description. The majority of texts is presented in hand copies, some by Jorgen Laessoe, but forty-eight of them were too poorly preserved to merit this effort. A small group is reproduced in photographs as well, which usually do not help in the reading of a text, but show its often bad condition. All this is solid work: the copies are expertly done and well reproduced. The catalogue could have been more convenient, however. The reader needs to turn to the indices to find page references to the introduction for the translation of terms and to find out whether names are geographical or personal. The author's opinion on certain cruces is not always provided. This would have been very helpful, especially since many relate to Hurrian, a language not widely known. There are some discrepancies between the copies and the transliterations, and it is not always clear that these are the result of collations.

The first fifty-six pages of the book present an introduction, not so much to the tablets published here, but to the entire Shemshara corpus. Eidem...