The chronological structure of the Nineveh legal corpus, as recovered from the dated tablets, is illustrated in Table I. As can be seen, the corpus covers the reigns of eight successive kings (the 'postcanonical' texts including, besides texts from the latter part of Assurbanipal's reign, also ones from the reigns of his sons Aššur-etel-ilani and Sin-šarru-iškun) and spans a period of some 135 years, from 747 B.C. down to the fall of Nineveh (612 B.C.). This long period of time is not at all, however, evenly covered by the corpus. Only about 7% of the texts date from the reigns of the first three kings, a period of 42 years (some 30% of the total time range of the corpus), and there are only two isolated texts from the reign of Shalmaneser V. Only from year 702 on do the numbers of texts per year gradually start to increase (Table II). This is clearly related to the construction history of the SW Palace of Sennacherib (which appears to have been habitable from 703 on even though the building in its entirety was not finished until 694), and strongly supports the conclusion drawn above that the majority of the texts derive from this palace.
The majority of the 8th century texts, from the North Palace, are from the reign of Sargon II, and it actually seems that many if not all of the earlier texts in the corpus also derive from archives belonging to officials of this king or his son Sennacherib. They will have been brought to Nineveh from Calah by these officials at the time the latter moved his staff and permanent residence to the North Palace about 715 B.C.[[21]]
21 Note the time coverage of the dossier of Mušallim-Issar (742 to 713 B.C.).
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola, 'The Chronological Structure of the Corpus', Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, Part I: Tiglath-Pileser III through Esarhaddon, SAA 6. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1991; online contents: SAAo/SAA06 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa06/natureoftheninevehlegalarchive/chronologicalstructureofthecorpus/]