The Ninevite Legal Texts as Historical Documents

As a sizeable collection of dated documents replete with prosopographical information, the present corpus is a source of prime historical importance. With the help of the dates, or, in their absence, the prosopographical evidence of the tablets, every little detail found on them can be fitted in its proper place in a chronological framework than in its turn can be used as a firm frame of reference in analysing other, undated texts from the period. And once properly placed in this chronological grid, even previously insignificant or seemingly meaningless details can turn out to shed unexpected light on contemporary history.

It is not possible, nor indeed within the scope of this introduction to review at length the information content of the corpus. We will limit ourselves to just one practical example encountered during the preparation of the volume, which illustrates the sort of surprises the corpus still (after 100 years of study) holds and is likely to present, once its data are subjected to a systematic and comprehensive chronological evaluation.

Simo Parpola

Simo Parpola, 'The Ninevite Legal Texts as Historical Documents', Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, Part I: Tiglath-Pileser III through Esarhaddon, SAA 6.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/ninevitelegaltextsashistoricaldocuments/]

 
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SAAo/SAA06, 2014-. Since 2015, SAAo is based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Historisches Seminar (LMU Munich, History Department) - Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East. Content released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] license, 2007-20.
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