Lexical and Other Notes on Old Babylonian Letters in the Schøyen Collection

Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale. 2021. Vol. 115. P. 203–218.

Arkhipov I.

The Schøyen collection houses 474 letters of the Old Babylonian period including the first Sealand dynasty (p. x). Eighteen of them were published as AbB 10 145 (previously the Dring collection), CUSAS 9 1–15, and CUSAS 10 15 and 16. In the volume under review, Andrew George edited 216 letters from the Schøyen collection (including AbB 10 145 as No. 146), supplemented by five letters from ‟another private collection” (Nos. 14–17 and 28). Later George published 65 school letters from the Schøyen collection in CUSAS 43. Eight letters from Dur-Abiešuh will be edited by Frans Van Koppen (p. x). The remaining Old Babylonian letters of the Schøyen collection await publication by George.

         The volume contains 220 Old Babylonian letters and one letter dated to the first Sealand dynasty (No. 221). Each letter is edited in transliteration and translation, with brief commentaries, and accompanied by a high-quality black-and-white photograph (the colour versions are available in the CDLI). Nos. 2, 4, 13, 25, 29, 32, and 212 are also provided with handcopies.

The texts come from clandestine excavations and were purchased from a variety of older collections (p. vi). According to Martin Schøyen, about 90 percent of Old Babylonian tablets in his collection “come from Larsa” (p. vii). George specifies that this means “Larsa and … places under Larsa’s control, such as Adab” (p. x). Most letters do come from Southern Babylonia, as their orthography and prosopography show, but their contents only rarely point to a more precise destination, namely Larsa, Uruk, Umma and Adab (see § 1 below).

Keywords: Ancient Near East