CHAPTER 3: INTRODUCTION TO THE CUNEIFORM TEXTS
Defining Parallel Texts
It can be considered a maxim of the present study that scribes in antiquity who copied
texts without necessarily maintaining exact letter or word sequences did not transmit their
texts in a precise way, and the texts thus reproduced will therefore not show themselves
through statistical analysis to be stable in transmission. On the other hand, copyists who
reproduced texts with the intention of representing as accurately as possible the sequence
of letters or words that existed in the copyist’s exemplar will by definition qualify as texts
that are transmitted in a stable way.
The problem remains of how the text-critic is to determine which texts are to be analysed
for signs of stability in transmission and which are to be left aside. For one, it is a surety
that the textual corpus of the ancient near east is too extensive to be subjected in its en-
tirety to a rigorous analysis in the space available here. It is unavoidable that some com-
promise must be made between the constraints of space in the present paper on one hand,
and the sheer volume of texts in the ancient near eastern corpus on the other.