The Historical Setting
We have restricted this investigation to cuneiform tablets from the first millennium
B.C.E. Texts will primarily be in Akkadian though some intermittent encounters with
Sumerian will be inevitable. Texts written exclusively in Sumerian will not be consid-
ered.
The first millennium B.C.E. cuneiform evidence examined here is primarily available
from the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Late Babylonian periods, although occa-
sional Seleucid period copies do exist. This means that our potential data covers the pe-
riod from the middle of the eighth century B.C.E. to at least the late fourth century B.C.E.
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (669-627 B.C.E.) is attributed with instigating the large
scale collection and reproduction of cuneiform documents.^106 The discovery of large
(^106) The most well known evidence for attributing the collation of texts at Nineveh to Ashurbanipal are the
tablets BM25676 and BM25678, published as CT XXII 1. These tablets are two copies of a letter in which
“[a]n Assyrian king, who most probably is Ashurbanipal, gives ... a written order to his agents in Babylonia
to search for tablets that might be useful for his royal library” (J.C. Fincke, "The Babylonian Texts of
Nineveh: Report on the British Museum's Ashurbanipal Library Project," AfO 50 (2004) 122).While the
sender is not so named, the letter is commonly attributed to Ashurbanipal. For example, see A.K. Grayson,
"Assyrian Civilization," The Cambridge Ancient History Volume III, Part 2: The Assyrian and Babylonian
Empires and Other States of the Near East, from the Eighth Century to the Sixth Century (eds J. Boardman,
I.E.S. Edwards, N.G.L. Hammond, and E. Sollberger; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996^2 ) 227.
However, note the objections in S.J. Lieberman, "Canonical and Official Cuneiform Texts: Towards an
Understanding of Assurbanipal's Personal Tablet Collection," Lingering Over Words: Studies in Ancient
Near Eastern Literature in Honor of William L. Moran (eds T. Abusch, J. Heuhnergard, and P. Steinkeller;
Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) 310, against these tablets being genuine official correspondence: “It is,
rather, a student’s copy of a (practice) letter, or rather two students’ copies of the same letter.” This may be
the case, but the reputation of Ashurbanipal as a collector and reader of diverse texts remains strong by way