eighth century B.C.E.^125 The focus of the present analysis must therefore be on the texts
that were authoritative in this sense.
Representative texts from five broad categories will be analysed: omens, phenomenologi-
cal observations, laws, epics and rituals.^126 The texts that exist in sufficient copies from
each of these categories are: tablet 63 of the series Enūma Anu Enlil; the ritual for induct-
ing the cult image known as mīs pî; the astronomical work MUL.APIN; the Laws of
Hammurabi; and the Epic of Gilgamesh. This selection is intended to include as broad a
range of ancient Near Eastern textual genres as possible to determine what kinds of texts,
if any, were likely to be copied with particular care and exactitude. We can thus set some
informed limits on the amount of material eligible for analysis.
For tablet 63 of Enūma Anu Enlil, also known as the Venus Tablet of Ammizaduga, all
available first millennium sources will be analysed and the most recent joins taken into
(^125) The primary evidence for this view is constituted in the fragments published by W.G. Lambert, "A Cata-
logue of Texts and Authors," JCS 16, 3 (1962) 59-77. These fragments provide a list of what were viewed
as closed bodies of work compiled by ancient authors. An important discussion of this catalogue and its
implications appears in K. van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press, 2007) 42-44, 207-21. According to W.G. Lambert, "Catalogue," 63, at least
three copies of the catalogue are represented by the fragments from Nineveh. 126
It has not been possible to analyse texts of a more rigorously scientific nature, such as astronomical dia-
ries or mathematical documents. Likewise, historical texts such as campaign annals have not been analysed
as these also cannot be properly categorised as parallel copies of one text. M. Cogan, "Some Text-Critical
Issues in the Hebrew Bible from an Assyriological Perspective," Textus 22 (2005) has shown that the varia-
tions between copies of the campaign annals of Ashurbanipal indicate that the transmission of such texts
was undertaken in the interests of communicating core information, with much less concern for the abso-
lute reproduction of the exact sequence of signs than in the other genres considered here. It can be said that
certain genres promote attempts by scribes for a relatively high level of exactitude, while in other genres
scribes seem to take a more free approach when copying a text.