Before the editing of this volume began, transliterations of the relevant texts had been entered into the electronic database of the State Archives of Assyria Project. The transliterations were largely the work of Manfried Dietrich with additions by Steven Cole and Simo Parpola. The corpus of Neo-Babylonian letters thus created had been standardised and completely lemmatised by Simo Parpola, and it was possible to efficiently search and study the corpus on line, which greatly expedited the editing process. I am indebted to all these scholars for their fundamental contribution to this publication.
Most of the texts edited here have been collated sign by sign in the British Museum. An initial 125 texts were collated by the volume editor, thirty-three additional texts by Irving Finkel and two by Grant Frame. Both the latter scholars also provided spot collations. I would like to thank them warmly for their generous and meticulous collaboration. The present edition includes many changes resulting from our collations.
I am grateful to the staff of the Department of the Ancient Near East of the British Museum for their friendly help in the Students' Room. Particular thanks go to Julian Reade and Dominique Collon for their assistance with the illustrations. These illustrations and my copies of three previously unpublished fragments are published here by kind permission of the staff and trustees of the museum.
My thanks are due to the staff of the State Archives of Assyria project in Helsinki who have made this volume a reality. Simo Parpola carried out much overall editorial work and tailored the indexing programmes to suit a volume of Babylonian texts. Robert Whiting gave technical support and acted as Managing Editor. Raija Mattila provided invaluable assistance throughout, especially in the later stages. Heather Baker made many significant contributions to this volume, both direct and indirect. Saana Teppo and Kaisa Åkerman helped with the typesetting of the first set of proofs. My sincere thanks go to them all.
This volume is dedicated to Philip Binns in gratitude for his constant support.
London, December 2001
Frances Reynolds
Frances Reynolds
Frances Reynolds, 'Preface', The Babylonian Correspondence of Esarhaddon and Letters to Assurbanipal and Sin-šarru-iškun from Northern and Central Babylonia, SAA 18. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 2003; online contents: SAAo/SAA18 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa18/saa18preface/]