PIHANS – serie

Zagros Studies contains nine articles on the archaeology and history of the Zagros Region in Iraq. Five of these are expanded versions of papers that were delivered at a conference celebrating the 75th anniversary of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) in December 2014. The other articles present results of the NINO archaeological project on the Rania Plain, and new investigations on the Shemshara Hills and other sites on the plain, which are threatened by Lake Dokan; a spectacular terracotta “tower” is published here for the first time.

This volume sees the publication of fifty-six early Old Babylonian letters from ca. 1880 BCE. They were found by legendary Iraqi archaeologist Taha Baqir in 1941 at the site of Tell ed-Der, ancient Sippar-Amnanum, in central Iraq. The letters are written in an early dialect of Akkadian and are part of the archives of an ancient firm. This firm consisted of a number of families engaged in local agriculture, the manufacturing of textiles, crediting, and international trade. As such it was part of the same larger trade networks as those already known from the contemporary Old Assyrian archives found in central Turkey. The firm strived to have good relations with local Amorite rulers, such as Sumu-la-El, the first king of Babylon, and they used their own trading agents to represent them in far-away cities such as Mari. For these reasons, the letters are also an important source for Babylonia’s political and socio-economic history.

In studies of the Assyrian merchant community established at Kültepe (KARUM Kanesh, level 2) in Anatolia in the early second millennium B.C., the texts with their associated cylinder and stamp sealings found there have traditionally been investigated separately. This book specifically seeks to integrate glyptic and textual studies in a way helpful both to scholars of Old Assyrian and to those with an interest in seals and sealing in the ancient Near East. The combined study of texts and sealings illuminates commercial and socio-legal activity in fresh ways, whilst the stylistic analyses sharpens chronological arguments and throws light on the community's foreign contacts. The book consists of two parts. The first analyses the sealing practices (in general and per type of record, with a special chapter on witnesses) and the seals, their ownership, manufacture, styles, iconography and inscriptions. Special chapters deal with the archives of the KARUM (with a list of their locations) and with the dating of texts and seals (with a list of the eponyms). Part two is a catalogue of 677 seals. It consists of tables offering, in a condensed form, essential data from the text envelopes on which the seals have been impressed, and of drawings of each of them. Extensive indices, of names, eponyms, seal owners/users, seal inscriptions, texts and seals complete this well-documented volume.

Ce deuxième ouvrage de la série TCTI présente l'édition de plus de 1400 tablettes cunéiformes sumériennes provenant de Girsu et conservées au Musée d'Istanbul. Avec ces deux volumes (TCTI I et II), sont donc désormais disponibles tous les textes administratifs néo-sumériens issus des fouilles menées à Tello en 1894-1895, et sommairement décrits en 1910 par H. de Genouillac dans le volume II/1 de l'Inventaire des Tablettes de Tello. Venant compléter les transcriptions et les index, une série de notes et commentaires souligne l'intérêt de ces documents parfois bien plus riches et attrayants qu'on ne pourrait le penser au premier abord.