amassed that will give a reasonable indication of what one can expect to find in the
broader corpus of Ancient Near Eastern literature. A precondition of our comparative
analysis is that it can only be executed upon texts that have been preserved in more than
one ancient copy. Obviously for the most reliable statistical results it is preferable to have
texts that exist in as many ancient copies as possible, but essentially only two copies from
antiquity need remain. Needless to say a preference will be given in the main analysis to
texts with the highest number of exemplars.
Texts can to some extent be selected based on the nature of their content as the rigidity
and endurance of a given textual edition can often depend on the subject matter which the
text itself addresses. It is perhaps an anachronism perpetrated by those unfamiliar with
the textual character of Assyrian royal annals to expect there to be any intention towards
exact accuracy in transmission in the minds of those ancient scribes that copied such
texts. Any familiarity with the textual style of the various copies of these texts must in-
form the modern reader that the Assyrian scribe felt free to change the order of certain
events, to omit certain material considered superfluous, and to re-order or exchange with
contextually synonymous equivalents various lexemes and phrases in the exemplar before
him. Expediency of language could certainly be a reason for such changes, as too could
matters of personal preference and style. What is important is that there is no textual evi-
dence that tells us that a scribe copying a tablet from Ashurbanipal’s royal annals, per-
haps even less than a single generation removed from when the autograph was inscribed,
felt it necessary to exactly preserve the text of his exemplar by creating a highly accurate