copy. Rather, a transmitted text of this type was something that owed some of its form to
the style and preference of the scribe that copied it.^118
Other texts, such as astronomical diaries and mathematical treatises, are by their nature
unsuitable for the present analysis. These were more likely to be one-off works that, if
reproduced at all, usually contributed to subsequent refined texts.^119 The same is true for
the official and private correspondence, as well as the enormous number of legal and
trade related documents so common to most archives in antiquity. These kinds of texts
lack the prerequisite quality for our present purpose, namely to reflect “textual stability
and fixed tablet sequence within a series.”^120
Oppenheim made essentially this binary distinction between types of texts when he
grouped the cuneiform literature into two broad categories. The first “can loosely be
termed the corpus of literary texts maintained, controlled, and carefully kept alive by a
(^118) Much of the wording in the preceding summary stems from discussions with M. Cogan between Febru-
ary and June 2007. 119
120 W. Horowitz, private conversation.
The phrase is appropriated from S.J. Lieberman, "Canonical and Official Cuneiform Texts," 305, who
thus describes Rochberg-Halton’s use of the word ‘canonicity.’ Still, the expression captures the nature of
the texts that are ideal for consideration in the present context. Some series may not have entirely fixed
tablet sequences. See, for example, the colophon of W1924.802 compared with that of K2321+3032. The
former, excavated from Kish in 1924 and written during the reign of Sargon II (721-705 B.C.E.), is labelled
as tablet 62 in the series Enūma Anu Enlil. The latter, presumably excavated from the libraries at Nineveh,
but originally of Babylonian origin, states that the tablet is the 63rd in the same series. Interestingly, both
W1924.802 and K2321+3032 are apparently of Babylonian origin – the former based on the statement in
the colophon “copy from Babylon, written according to its original and collated,” and the latter based on its
palaeography. See H. Hunger, Babylonische und Assyrische Kolophone (Kevelaer: Butson & Bercker,
1968) 58, 132, nos. 150 and 469 respectively.