From this we may make a tentative observation regarding the texts that do not fall under
the genres of ‘ritual’ or ‘law.’ Much of the minor levels of fluidity that are evidenced in
the parallel copies of these texts could be attributed to subtle changes in form that re-
sulted from the imperfect processes of memory recall. It is conceivable that, during the
regular course of transmission as posited by Carr, texts recalled from a scribe’s memory
would have been especially susceptible to unconscious variations in orthography, lan-
guage, and even minor changes in style.
Certainly, greater differences in style and hermeneutic would likely be due to the scribe’s
conscious reworking of the text using literary motifs memorised from other sources, or
supplanting certain details with others that served an exegetical motive. It seems clear,
though, that when a scribe was applied to “copying and checking” a text “according to its
original,” which had a relatively fixed format and an established place in a literary series,
the memorised version seems to have had primacy over its textual counterpart. In the
light of this observation we can ask what qualities of the mīs pî ritual text at Nineveh al-
lowed it to remain relatively impervious to the vicissitudes that are so apparent in the
other texts examined here.
Two recent studies may be invoked to elucidate this phenomenon. Firstly, it has been ob-
served by M. Worthington that it is a characteristic of Assyrian priests to use relatively
few Babylonianisms in their correspondence to Assyrian kings, in particular when com-
pared to the relatively extensive use of Babylonian technical and dialect forms by Assyr-