As with other groups, neither the external appearance of these texts nor their internal structure and contents permit us to reconstruct a methodical series. A few texts are clearly unique compilations for a single occasion, others bear clear affinities to each other; but their broken state usually prevents us from identifying their specific purpose except by guesswork.
In the cirumstances, we have placed first the fragments from multi-column tablets dealing with silver and gold, which may perhaps reflect the activities of an administrative "office" within the palace, responsible for documenting the receipt and/or disbursement of precious materials. The shorter memoranda and notes (Nos. 71-81) follow, while Nos. 82-86 are concerned with precious (or rather semi-precious) stones, which were probably handled by the same "office," since they are occasionally listed together with silver and gold. Nos. 87-92 deal with other, base, metals, mostly copper, and may well be unassociated with each other and with the precious metal texts.
Of the texts which can be dated, one probably (no. 58) and two certainly (nos. 57 and 79) belong to the reign of Sargon. No. 60 probably and nos. 59 and 61 certainly date to the reign of Assurbanipal; no. 77 may also. These texts therefore mirror the chronological distribution of the Neo-Assyrian letters, belonging either before or after the reign of Sennacherib (pace Zadok, whose reasons for dating no. 58 to his reign do not seem to us compelling). This justifies a mild a priori assumption that the majority of the undated texts in this group will belong to one of these two reigns.
Although the Neo-Assyrian administration seems (at least to judge from its cuneiform output on clay) to have been much less bureaucratic than some of its predecessors, it is only to be expected that meticulous accounts of gold and silver were kept. Equally it is no surprise to find such archives in the royal palace (rather than the ēkal māšarti or some such establishment, where we might well expect more texts referring to the baser metals than we have here): incoming valuables would have tended to be items presented to the king himself, the king or those in his immediate entourage would tend to authorize disbursement of valuable elite items, and finally it is likely that the intrinsic and symbolic value of the silver and gold would have led to its remaining under direct royal supervision. Thus it is not too surprising that, like the correspondence of Sargon, some of the documents relating to precious metals were retained in the palace chancery and eventually reached Nineveh, no doubt via the same route.
The only official we can identify with responsibility for the precious metals is Keni, who is responsible in no. 79 (mentioning 711 B.C.) for the remarkable quantity of nearly 5 talents of gold, and probably also figures in no. 86, which deals with precious stones. It is surely the same Kenî who issues silver in ND 2650 (Iraq 23 Pl. XXI, probably dated to 713 B.C.), and it seems quite possible that his son is mentioned in a letter from Sargon's treasurer concerned with gold and silver (ABL 1458 = SAA 1 52, perhaps after the death of Keni himself?). Unfortunately, in none of these instances do we learn his official position; it is impossible to say whether the Keni of ABL 90 = SAA 1 76, who is designated LÚ.A.BA-É.[x], was the same person. Nor is it clear if no. 79 derives from his own "department" or from another doing business with him.
Be that as it may, we may fairly assume for the moment that nos. 57 and 58, which belong to the same period, and are externally similar to each other, also belonged archivally with the same department. No. 58 is a list of disbursements of gold and silver rings, etc. to visiting delegations at different times and places. Most of these gifts were perhaps made in the royal palace at Calah or Dur-Šarruken (if the attribution to Sargon is correct), but in at least two cases the delegations are said to have brought their horses or tribute to Arbil, and this presumably means that the king was there en route to or from a campaign. This is the accountant's record of events we find in the royal annals described in terms like this (cf. Fig. 2 on p. XXI): "I clothed (them) with coloured garment(s), I bound their wrists with tores of gold, and I stationed them before me" (lubulti birme ulabbiš HAR.MEŠ KUG.GI urakkisa rittēšun ina mahrīya ulzissunūti; Streck Asb. p.20 ii.93f.; see NARGD pp.41-4 for similar passages in the annals and in a royal land-grant; and, for Sennacherib, Luckenbill Senn. 45 and 89).
No. 103, like no. 58, has three narrow columns on each face and is of almost identical width, although more carefully written. It partly lists receipts of silver, including 1,112 items from the Governor of Que on the 29th of Iyyar, but then goes on (in a section introduced by za' uzzu, the NA equivalent of ŠÁ.BA) to record out-payments to visiting delegations from the receipts, including one in Dur-Šarruken on the 9th of Sivan and another in the same month at a place whose name is lost. In other words, this account tablet confirms that, during Sargon's reign at least, documentation of both receipts and disbursements of these precious metals was handled by a single department closely attached to the royal palace. It seems likely that the first column of the tablet lists gifts made to the king by some of his high state officials, but the breaks, especially of the beginning of the heading in i. 1, mean that we cannot be sure that they gave, rather than received.
No other pieces in this group certainly belong with the Sargon archives (although nos. 73 and 86 could well do so), and our ensuing discussion assumes that the remainder, with the exception of no. 60, which is from the reign of Esarhaadon, belong broadly to the reign of Assurbanipal. The short note no. 77 is linked through its mention of Abda', the governor of Raṣappa, to the lists of high officials nos. 3 and 4, which date to the reign of Assurbanipal. In this group too a few pieces have a clearly secular context: no. 59 is a 6 year summary of receipts, referring to such well known secular categories as iškāru and maddattu; and no. 78 is a store-room inventory of items, like hundreds of silver bowls and ingots, best known as components in tribute deliveries.
The range of precious items recorded in these evidently secular contexts is usually quite restricted. This is hardly surprising: the texts themselves make it clear that they are listing the regular currency of elite exchange between the royal palace and its clients and high-ranking dependants in and outside the country. There is a limited range of conventional "gifts": commonest are heavy rings or tores (HAR= šabirru, the Assyrian form of OB šewirum). These are sometimes specified as for the "arm" (durā'i) or "wrist" (ritte), but more often weighed: from no. 58 we learn that they may weigh as much as 1 mina, with smaller ones of a half, a third or a quarter of a mina, and the smallest are simply qualified as "thin" (SIG = qatnu?). Other ornaments were also distributed in this text, including the obscure kurināte (no. 58; also in no. 73), and the type of ring called qudāsu (no. 58). These items are usually going out from the royal treasury. Others are coming in: the "fish" of no. 57 are quite obscure, but the silver bowls (kappu), which may be given the specific description "tribute bowls" (kappi maddatte) and sometimes at least weighed 1 mina each, are readily recognized on the reliefs in the hands of tribute-bearers.
In contrast, several of the multi-column tablets listing a different, and rather exotic, range of items have clear connections with the temples. Most explicit (because best preserved) are nos. 60 and 62. No. 60 lists items from Akkad returned from Elam, and is probably to be connected with the incident mentioned in the Esarhaddon Chronicle for 674/3 B.C. when Ištar and the other gods of Akkad were returned to Babylonia by Urtaku (Grayson Chronicles, p. 126; this dating supported by the mention of Nikkal-iddin, the governor of Uruk during Esarhaddon's reign). No. 62 enumerates a series of similar assemblages of precious goods - gold, silver, and various other items - presumably given or assigned to different deities. This second list also includes valuable textiles, but is mainly composed of paired items written ÁB and ZAG upni: we have no convincing explanation for these terms (which recur in no. 81), but have rendered ZAG upni as "prayer bowl" on the unproven assumption that it is to be read pūtupni and connected with the phrase upnu petu, "to open the fist, i.e. to pray." This is no more than a convenience, and the reader is asked not to take such renderings as a firm proposal on our part.
The other multi-column tablets (nos. 61-71) and no. 72 list a greater variety of items, but here too there are signs that temple furnishings or property are involved, though not all as explicit as the reference to a shrine (atmunu) at Nineveh in no. 75 r. 25f or a temple in no. 63 r. i'.4'. None of these lists is sufficiently preserved at beginning or end to reveal its purposes or identity (only no. 71 retains a clear heading (KUG.UD pa-hur-tum), but the meaning of this is obscure). Mostly they do not however seem to be mere inventories: no. 64 is perhaps the most informative: it includes sections summarized as "the responsibility of" (piqit) PN, items said to be "at the disposal of" (ina pān) PN (one of the same individuals), and a summary referring to 12 minas 27 shekels of gold "an assay in the domestic quarters not weighed." Individual sections refer to items being made from a quantity of gold, and the final lines of the text describe 4 minas of silver as the "audience-gift of Milki-Issar." This clearly constitutes a departmental account over some period of time, but even these hints are insufficient to convey a clear picture of who is recording what. No. 63 is a "departmental memorandum" (using the 1st person plural in places), which tellingly comments at one point "when they brought [something] to us from the palace."
The list of treasure recovered from Elam (no. 60) includes a miscellany of vessels and pieces of temple furniture, but most of these tablets give detailed technical descriptions of a rather limited range of elaborately ornamented items. These are principally the qullu (a band or clasp of some kind?), the looking-glass (?: ša-IGI.DU8), the dappastu, a textile often of red wool, and an enigmatic item BAN.DÀ usually preceded by the leather determinative KUŠ. Passages of as many as 10 lines may be devoted to describing a single one of these: for instance in no. 66 r. i' the description of the dappastu mentions hundreds of gold ornaments the weight of which is presumably summarised at the end of the section. This is clearly one of the "golden garments of the gods" to which Oppenheim devoted an article in JNES 8 (1949) 172-193. Neo-Babylonian administrative texts quoted by him there list textiles (muṣîptu) with "561 rosettes and 560 tenšia" of gold, or, in another case, "468 rosettes and 469 tensia" of gold. Although Oppenheim could illustrate the practice of adorning divine costumes with hundreds of gold applique ornaments from the Assyrian reliefs, he was not able to cite comparable Neo-Assyrian textual evidence, but it is now clear that this is what we have here. From nos. 64, 66 and 68 we see that the Assyrian dappastu may have up to 400 golden ornaments which come in pairs like their Neo-Babylonian counterparts: for the Babylonian ayāru ("rosette") and tenšia (meaning unknown), we have Assyrian takkusat ("tube"?; or cf. takulathu?) and b/puṭu[...] (completely obscure - a connection with ZAG upni would be problematic). The Assyrian word represented by (KUŠ.)BÀN.DA is unknown, but it was an elaborately decorated item. It seems to have comprised a "cauldron" (ruqqu), a setting or chain (ṣibtu), and a belt or band (mėṣiru). The decorations included "columns" (timmu), falcons' heads, doves, stars, cowries, and pomegranates, mostly of gold but also in ivory and precious stones. The multi-column tablets give detailed descriptions of individual BÀN.DA's, and no. 72 lists 34 of them with less detail. No convincing identification of this evidently important item occurs to us at present, but Parpola has suggested that it may have been a chain or necklace, BÀN.DA (šerru) being a pun for (šer)šerrutu (AHw. 1218a).
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate, 'Inventories of Metals and Stones (Nos, 57-92)', 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/inventoriesreceiptsanddisbursements/inventoriesofmetalsandstonesnos5792/]