As is the case in the other RINAP volumes, numerous inscriptions that refer to the respective Assyrian king fall outside the scope of the present volume. In the case of Sargon II, such texts include letters to or from Sargon, legal and administrative texts dated to his reign, the one land grant issued in his name, and the various literary texts that mention him. Several royal inscriptions that have sometimes been attributed to Sargon have been treated elsewhere in the RINAP series or are omitted here for other reasons.
(1) A fragmentary inscription on a statue (IM 60497B, ND 5571) found in the Ninurta Temple at Nimrud (ancient Kalḫu) has sometimes been assigned to Shalmaneser III, Tiglath-pileser III, or Sargon II. The text has been treated in Tadmor and Yamada, RINAP 1 as Tiglath-pileser no. 36.
(2) An inscription on a stone fragment in the Vatican Museum (VAT/15023) was once thought to come from Khorsabad and to belong to Sargon II (see Bezold, Literatur p. 94 §56.14.m), but it is now known to belong to Sennacherib. For this text, see Sennacherib no. 44 ex. 1 in Grayson and Novotny, RINAP 3/2.
(3) A poorly preserved inscription found on two fragments of a clay tablet (K 6205+82-3-23,131) describes an Assyrian king's campaign against Hezekiah of Judah and an attack on the latter's city of Azekah. This inscription, which is often called the Azekah Inscription, was assigned to Tiglath-pileser III by L. Jakob-Rost, but has more recently been assigned by scholars to either the time of Sargon II or Sennacherib. This text is arbitrarily assigned to Sennacherib in the RINAP series and is given as Sennacherib no. 1015 in Grayson and Novotny, RINAP 3/2.
(4) A fragment of a Neo-Assyrian stele was found at Ben Shemen in Israel and now bears the registration number 71.74.221 in the Israel Museum. H. Tadmor dated the text to the reign of Sargon II (in Aviram, Eretz Shomron [1973] p. 72 [in Hebrew]), and W. Horowitz and T. Oshima agreed with this (Canaan pp. 19 and 45), but M. Cogan suggests it may come from the reign of Esarhaddon (Studies Ephʿal pp. 66–69; Cogan, Raging Torrent p. 233 no. 4). The text is included in Leichty, RINAP 4 as Esarhaddon no. 1007.
(5) A rock relief located in the upper Tigris valley at Eğil, about 50 km from Diyarbakir in Turkey, has sometimes been ascribed to Shalmaneser III or Sargon II. The relief may depict a deity and the inscription is no longer legible. See Börker-Klähn, Bildstelen no. 154; Russell, RLA 9/3–4 (1999) p. 256.
(6) A weathered Neo-Assyrian relief that is located on Uzunoğlantepe, about 2 km north of the village of Ferhatlı in the vilayet of Adana in southern Turkey, has been assigned variously to Shalmaneser III and Sargon II (see Taşyürek, AnSt 25 [1975] pp. 169–172; Börker-Klähn, Bildstelen no. 235; Reade, IrAnt 12 [1977] p. 44); however, the relief bears no inscription.
(7) A stele with an inscription of the mother of Sennacherib, and thus a wife of Sargon, has been presented as Grayson and Novotny, RINAP 3/2 no. 2001, just as the inscriptions of Naqī'a (Zakūtu) were presented with those of her son Esarhaddon (Leichty, RINAP 4 nos. 2003–2009).
(8) For the clay sealing Sm 2276 mentioning Sargon II and dating to the eponymy of Taklāk-ana-Bēl (715) that H. Winckler included in his work on the royal inscriptions of this king (Sar. 1 p. 196 and 2 pl. 49 no. 12) and D.D. Luckenbill in his translations of Sargon's inscriptions (ARAB 2 p. 114 §229), see Johns, ADD no. 766 and Fales and Postgate, SAA 11 no. 49 (with a photo of the sealing on p. 40). The royal stamp seal depicts the Assyrian king slaying a lion (see Figure 1). For another sealing possibly to be ascribed to Sargon II, see text no. 1002.
Figure 1. Sealing impressed with the royal seal of Sargon II (Sm 2276). © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Inscriptions of various independent and semi-independent rulers interacting with Assyria at the time are also not included. In addition to some Urartian royal inscriptions, we might note in particular the Akkadian inscription on the cylinder seal of Urzana, the king of Muṣaṣir whom Sargon forced to flee when the Assyrians attacked that city during Sargon's eighth campaign in 714 (see for example Thureau-Dangin, TCL 3 p. xii and Collon, First Impressions pp. 86–87 no. 405), and the Aramaic inscription on a stone stele found at Tepe Qalaichi, near Bukān in northwestern Iran, which may have been erected in the Mannean capital Izirtu during the reign of Sargon (see for example Lemaire, Studia Iranica 27 [1998] pp. 15–30 and Lipiński, Studies 4 pp. 19–27).
Grant Frame, 'Texts Excluded from RINAP 2', RINAP 2: Sargon II, Sargon II, The RINAP 2 sub-project of the RINAP Project, 2021 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap2/rinap2introduction/textsexcluded/]