In his Recueil de Tablettes chaldéennes (Paris, E. Leroux, 1903) Fr. Thureau-Dangin gave as his third series a number of texts of the Sargonic period, dated in the reigns of Shargani-shar-ali and Naram-Sin. A number more are published or described in the Inventaire des tablettes de Tello conservées au Musée Impérial Ottoman, Tome I, by Thureau-Dangin, 1910, and Tome II, by H. de Genouillac, 1911, and several other collections are to be published shortly.
The very early texts from the ancient Shuruppak which have reached the Louvre were published by Thureau-Dangin in his Recueil named above, and in the Revue d’Assyriologie, vi (1904), pp. 143-54, he wrote Contrats archaïques provenant de Shuruppak, with the intention of deciphering and explaining them as far as possible.
Contract Literature.
Many texts published in the above collections of Temple Accounts are bonds, deeds of sale, even legal decisions, &c., and really come under the head of contracts. But even among the collections of contracts some accounts have been published, and it is scarcely necessary here to quote the same book under both heads.
Curiously enough the first contracts to attract attention were of an early date. Loftus found at Senkereh a number of most interesting case-tablets, the principal document being invariably enclosed in a clay envelope which, as was subsequently discovered, was inscribed with an abstract or practical duplicate of the principal document. Many speculations arose as to their purpose. Some regarded them as a substitute for money, or cheques, banknotes in clay (so Layard in 1853), and other weird guesses. George Smith first recognized their meaning and value for history by publishing their dates, the names which the Babylonians gave to the years, calling them after some prominent event.
Discovered in 1854, they were first published in 1882 by J. N. Strassmaier. Owing to some misapprehension, as given in Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon, p. 496, despite the clear statement on pp. 270-72 of Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldea and Susiana, they were called Die altbabylonischen Verträge aus Warka in the Beilage to the Verhandlungen des V. internationalen Orientalistischen Congresses zu Berlin, 1881. They were accompanied by a list of words and names. E. and V. Revillout discussed them most interestingly in Une Famille de commerçants de Warka. They proved to be of the time of Hammurabi and his son Samsu-iluna after these kings had expelled Rîm-Sin from the South of Babylonia. But there were several dated in the reign of Rîm-Sin, and in those of Sin-idinnam and Nûr-adad, kings who had preceded him. Thus they showed how, despite changes of dynasty, the civil life of the subject population went on undisturbed, and customs changed but little. They show how closely the Code pictures the daily life of the people. As most illustrative of the Code, constituting a contemporary commentary on its regulations and consisting chiefly of examples of the same cases as there considered, we may here group in order of publication the collections from the First Dynasty of Babylon.
Inscribed Babylonian Tablets in the possession of Sir Henry Peek, Bart., 1888, contained a few texts of this period, copied, transcribed, and translated by T. G. Pinches. This made considerable advances, but there was not yet enough material to solve many obscurities. These tablets came from Sippara.
It was evident that the only hope of understanding such technical documents lay in the publication of further material, so that by comparison of similar passages some information could be obtained as to alternative readings and phrases.
In 1893 a great advance was made by Meissner with his Beiträge zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht (Leipzig, Hinrichs), which gave a full transliteration and translation of 111 texts, all carefully published in autography. Full notes and invaluable comments made this a standard work. The texts were chiefly from tablets found at Sippara, and stored in the British Museum, and at Berlin where a large quantity had been purchased. Meissner also reproduced some of the Warka texts.
In the fourth volume of Schrader’s Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, 1896, F. E. Peiser gave a collection of contract texts in transcription and translation, arranged in chronological order. He included thirty-one texts of this period (Berlin, Reuther and Reichard). These were called Texte juristischen und geschäftlichen Inhalts, and marked a further advance in treatment. In this year also began the great series of publications called Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, &c., in the British Museum, printed by order of the Trustees. Vols. ii, iv, vi, and viii (1896, 1897, 1898, 1899), contain copies of no fewer than 395 texts mostly of this period, a most valuable addition to our knowledge of the subject. They were from the practised hand of T. G. Pinches, who gave in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1897 and 1899, some transliterations and translations with notes and comments on fifteen of them. They were all Sippara tablets.