The Lexical Texts from Nuzi

HMA 9-3022; administrative tablet from Nuzi with seal impression. © Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology [http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/], University of California at Berkeley.

The city of Nuzi was located to the East of Assur, not far from the modern city of Kirkuk (Iraq). The many thousands of tablets that were found at this site not only come from the temples and the central government building, but also from private houses, allowing a detailed insight in the life and social structure of a provincial town in the period around 1400 BCE. The texts are written in Akkadian, but a large percentage of the population bore Hurrian names. Nuzi texts frequently include Hurrian words or loans from Hurrian; it is likely that for most scribes in this town Akkadian was a foreign tongue.

During this period Nuzi belonged to the kingdom of Arrapha, itself a vassal of Mitanni, one of the main powers on the world stage of the time. After the Hittite king Šupiluliuma defeated the Mitanni army the power vacuum in Northern Mesopotamia was filled by Assur, which quickly grew from a provincial city to a world power. Around 1350 Nuzi was destroyed by the Assyrians and the archives end.

Among the six to seven thousand cuneiform tablets from Nuzi there are seven lexical texts, all of them thematic lists. Six of these contain brief sections from the list of wooden objects, one has a passage from the list of human beings. All seven are exercises; there are no multi-column exemplars known from Nuzi. Some of the exercises (partly) duplicate, suggesting that they may derive from a single teaching session, perhaps at the very end of Nuzi's existence.

Map of the Ancient Near East around 1400 BCE, showing the kingdom of Mitanni at its greatest extent. ©Javier Fernandez-Vina; licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Nuzi lexical lists are remarkably similar to the Syro-Hittite versions from Emar and related exemplars from Ugarit, Alalakh, Ekalte and Šibaniba. Together, these sites define the full extent of the Mitanni kingdom at its height, from the Mediterranean in the West to the Zagros in the East. It is likely that Mitanni scribes introduced the Babylonian lexical tradition to this entire area.

Further reading

• Civil, Miguel 1987 Notes Brèves. Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archéologie Orientale 81: 187-88.
• Maidman, Maynard P. 1995 Nuzi: Portrait of an Ancient Mesopotamian Provincial Town. Pp. 931-47, ed. Jack M. Sasson. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Peterson, Jeremiah 2006 Direct Interconnections between the Lexical Traditions of Kassite Babylonia and the Periphery. Ugarit Forschungen 38: 577-92.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Nuzi', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/nuzi/]