Provenance

These tablets are almost all from those brought to the British Museum by Layard and his successors from the palace mound of Kuyunjik. Of the tablets excavated by King and Thompson, nos. 20 and 81 are known to have been found in the N abu Temple excavations. Otherwise nothing is known of the detailed provenance of individual tablets within the mound, but for the archives as a whole the situation has recently improved. The present state of knowledge is set out in the complementary articles of Reade, "Archaeology and the Kuyunjik archives," CRRAI 30 (1986), 213ff., and Parpola, "The royal archives of Nineveh," ibid. 223ff. For our present purposes, we may quote Reade's comment that "The South-West Palace also produced a wide range of official documents and private archives . ... We can be sure, from their dates of excavation, that many of these were found, not in the area of Rooms XL-XLI but in rooms well to the south. Layard also noted many sealings from Room LXI" (p. 220). This may be compared with Parpola's demonstration that the collection 83-1-18, which includes many of our administrative texts, though not those from the reign of Sargon, should be attributed to the SW Palace (pp. 227-230). It is gratifying to find that indeed Reade is able to be more precise: "An unpublished report from H. Rassam suggests that most of the 83-1-18 Nineveh tablets were found in the area of Room LIV in the South-West Palace" (pp. 213-4).

As for the texts from Sargon's reign, Parpola has concluded, from a study of the Rm 2 collection, that the majority of the archival texts from the reign of Sargon would have been stored in the North palace (pp. 230-232).

FIG.1

Plan of Sennacherib's Palace. THe administrative archives found in the 1880's mostly come from the region of Room LIV

F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate

F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate, 'Provenance', 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/provenance/]

 
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