Unattributed

Chapter 3 contains pieces that are unattributed fragments of grants or schedules to grants plus a few scraps that could equally well be part of other types of texts (legal, administrative, decrees, or royal inscriptions) that have been included here because of some physical characteristics or terminology that is similar to grant texts.

Nos. 45-47 are fragments that have traces of royal seal impressions preserved. No. 45 begins a description of properties immediately after the seal impressions as does no. 6 (Adad-nerari III), but this is hardly sufficient grounds for an attribution. No. 46 has only traces of two lines before the seal impressions. It is presumed to be a land grant, but as nos. 78 and 79 show, it could also be another type of royal decree or proclamation. The writing KUR ^daš-šur.KI is not paralleled anywhere else in this corpus. No. 47 has no text at all preserved; only traces of a royal seal and a horizontal ruling. Sachs, Iraq 15 (1953) 170, no. 31, noted that the seal is very similar to Aššur-etel-ilani seal impressions and suggested the tablet was written in his name.

No. 48, from Huzirina, is classified as a land grant for temple offerings, but it also contains a decree of offerings (riksa rakāsu), the appointment of a priest and personnel to maintain the temple and exemptions for the land and the temple personnel accompanied by the normal do ut des motif that characterizes votive gifts; it is actually a hybrid, all-in-one text: land grant, decree of offerings, votive donation and royal appointment. It was probably a building inscription as well. The name of the king is not preserved, but the document is in favour of the temple of Zababa and Babu. No. 87 records Sennacherib's dedication of personnel to the temple of Zababa and Babu that he built in Aššur, and one might speculate that Sennacherib also built and endowed their temple in Huzirina, but the text itself provides no evidence for this. With regard to Gaiter's uncertainty about the location of this temple (ARRIM 2 [1984] 2) the statement about the settling of Assyrians in the area (r.6-7) would seem to rule out Aššur.

The nature of no. 49 is open to question. It was Johns who first put this piece into the category of grants (or as he referred to them, "proclamations"), and even he was uncertain.^[[37]] While the terms found in this fragment are found in grants, closer parallels to the flow of the text are to be found in inscriptions such as the "Aššur Charter" of Sargon^[[38]] or the dedicatory inscription of Esarhaddon^[[39]] for the renewal of the Aššur Temple. This last text suggests the restoration of andurāršu]nu as the object of aškun in I.9', but this is hardly the only possibility. If the interpretation of the writing of Assyria with AN.ŠÁR is correct in I.1 ', then the text should probably be dated sometime during or after the reign of Sennacherib.

TABLE II. Grant and Schedule Fragments

The remaining texts are all either schedules to grants or fragments of grants or schedules that have only descriptions of property and/or names of persons preserved. While, in most cases, it is possible to categorize these pieces according to the styles of the Assurbanipal schedule (no. 27; run-on lists with land and people mixed) and the Aššur-etel-ilani grants (nos. 36-37; tabular lists with land and people separate), at the present state of our knowledge, these categorizations are not sufficient to attribute the fragments because we do not know that there were not Assurbanipal grants with the schedule embedded in the text or that there were not Aššur-etel-ilani grants with a separate schedule attached. The distribution of the schedules and fragments into Assurbanipal (Abp) and Aššur-etel-ilani (Aei) types is shown in Table II.

No. 50 is a nearly complete schedule to what, based on our present knowledge, must have been an Assurbanipal grant. Unfortunately the name of the grantee is not preserved, but the parallels to no. 27 are unmistakable, even though this text uses the adi nišišu notation (occasionally replaced by KI.MIN) while no. 27 has more detailed demographic information using x Zl.MEŠ. One notes that this huge tablet, which must originally have had at least 50 lines on each side and contained hundreds of names, does not have a single horizontal ruling preserved to organize the information for the reader. As a concession to internal organization the descriptions of properties almost always come at the beginning of a line, the scribe having on several occasions (e.g., II. 11, 27 and 33) spaced out a line to allow this to happen, but the exceptions in II. 6, 10 and 16 show that even this was not rigourously adhered to.

By the same token, No. 51 was most likely part of an Aššur-etel-ilani type grant. Considering that only the lower 10 cm or so of the text is preserved there is plenty of room for the superscription, seals, and historical preamble at the top. The fact that in line 5' adi nišišu is written out while in the remainder of cases it is regularly replaced with Kl.MIN indicates that this marks the end of the list of landed property and the beginning of the list of personnel.

37 ADD IV, p. 200.

38 See above, n. 4.

39 See above, n. 5.

Laura Kataja & Robert Whiting

Laura Kataja & Robert Whiting, 'Unattributed', Grants, Decres and Gifts of the Neo-Assyrian Period, SAA 12. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1995; online contents: SAAo/SAA12 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa12/grantsoflandandtaxexemption/unattributed/]