It might seem surprising that hundreds of documents apparently constituting part of the imperial archives of Assyria should be receiving an edition here for the first time, ninety years after their publication by Johns in cuneiform hand-copies. There are three main reasons for this, of which the reader should be aware. One is that these are intrinsically difficult texts, abounding with bureaucratic shorthand and technical terms. Much of the grammar of the Neo-Assyrian dialect has only been properly understood since the 1960's, and some no doubt remains to be elicited.
A second reason is that although Johns was an experienced reader of cuneiform texts, and frequently deciphered difficult passages, by modern standards his copies were inadequate, in ADD Vol. II especially. This was not only because of those specific cases where lines were omitted ( easily done in administrative texts), and signs badly miscopied, but in general because the format in which the copies were presented did not convey the format of the original documents. This withheld from the reader the tablet's layout in the form of columns, spaces, and rulings, and so deprived us of valuable clues to the scribes' intentions.
Thirdly there is the condition of the tablets themselves. Except for the final group of Aššur Temple offerings, only a handful of tablets in this volume are intact, and a great many pieces are small fragments from large texts in several columns. Many joins were made within this material by Johns himself and other early Assyriologists, and some joins have been added recently by Dr. T. Kwasman and the editors, but only rarely does this lead to a significant improvement. This is primarily because a real understanding of administrative documents is heavily dependent on having the introductory and closing statements which tell us what the text is about; and these are usually on the most vulnerable parts of the tablet, the top or bottom ends and corners.
In summary, it is only fair to acknowledge that the texts in this volume fall far short of the standards set by Mari or Ebla. They are not however as valueless as their century of academic neglect might suggest. Repeated collation and the improved understanding of Neo-Assyrian as a whole have solved many of the obscurities of the old ADD II, and the thematic grouping of the material has also enabled considerable advances in characterizing what we have. In this introductory chapter we have sought to give a broad view of the nature of each group of texts, but this is no substitute for further detailed studies: the prosopography of the Nineveh court has to be examined in the light of all the letters and legal and administrative texts, once freshly edited, and there is undoubtedly progress to be made on the technical aspects of textiles and precious metals, to mention only the two biggest groups.
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate, 'Nature of the Texts', Imperial Administrative Records, Part I: Palace and Temple Administration, SAA 7. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1992; online contents: SAAo/SAA07 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2021 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa07/introduction/natureofthetexts/]