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The Nimrud Letters, 1952—Part VI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

H. W. F. Saggs
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Extract

The six letters here edited, four of them substantially complete, are amongst the hitherto unpublished tablets found at Nimrud in 1952. The legibility of these letters, first copied by me in Baghdad in 1954, has been much improved by the skilled treatment they have received at the hands of Mr. C. A. Bateman of the British Museum; in one case the extensive improvement in legibility rendered it advisable to make a completely new copy, and on other tablets obscure passages have become (at least physically) clear. I wish to express my thanks to my friend and colleague Professor D. J. Wiseman, Joint-Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, for arranging for these and other letters of the collection to be put at my disposal for further study.

LXV is written from Babylon by an official, probably the governor of Arrapha, on behalf of himself and the Turtan at the moment that the gates of Babylon had been forced at the final crushing of the Ukin-zer rebellion in 730 B.C. Possibly connected with the aftermath of the rebellion is LXVI, which is taken to be a reply to a royal enquiry informing the king that no Babylonian “fifth column” had appeared during the Assyrian action against the southern capital.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1963 , pp. 70 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1963

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References

1 For letters from this collection already published see Iraq XXI, Part 2, pp. 158–179Google Scholar and Plates XLIII–XLIX, and references in op. cit., p. 158, n. 1. For details of find-place see Iraq XV, Part I, p. 33Google Scholar.

2 See Iraq XVII, Part 1, pp. 44–50Google Scholar.

3 See Iraq XVII, Part 2, pp. 149fGoogle Scholar.

4 In the transliteration ideograms are generally transliterated into Akkadian, but are given as Sumerian (1) where the relationship to its context of the sign represented by the ideogram is not entirely clear, (2) where only traces of the sign remain and doubt might exist as to the sign which is being restored. It was felt that the convenience of this procedure justified the inconsistency.

˹x˺ is used to denote an unidentified sign of which traces are visible. Dots represent sections of the tablet upon which the signs are entirely lost, with the number of dots approximately proportional to the lost section, at the rate (insofar as it is possible to guess at the number of signs lost) of three dots per sign.