At all times the great temples of Assyria and Babylonia kept extensive
accounts of even daily revenue and expenditure. These accounts were most
carefully preserved, being written with special care on well selected
clay, and have reached us as a rule in exceptionally fine condition.
They give us an immense mass of information, largely consisting of dry
and disconnected items, but helping to build up knowledge. The French
explorations made by DE SARZEC at Telloh resulted in the discovery of an
enormous number of documents, mostly accounts kept of the daily expenses
and revenues of the vast temples there, from the earliest times down to
the Dynasty of Ur. One huge find of some 30,000 tablets of the latter
period were stolen by Arabs, and have been sold in large quantities to
European and American Museums, or to private collectors. Few of them are
legal documents, or concerned with other than Temple business, but
their contents illustrate the state of society in the times before the
First Dynasty of Babylon. They are most important for determining the
extent to which the Code of Hammurabi was dependent on, or influenced
by, the Sumerian Law of earlier days.
Of those which reached Constantinople, the products of the season of
1894 consisted entirely of tablets of the Dynasty of Ur, and were
classified by V. SCHEIL. The tablets found in 1895 were catalogued by
THUREAU-DANGIN, and are mostly of the Dynasty of Akkad. The finds of
1900 are all of the Dynasty of Ur. These are all now catalogued and
largely published in the _Inventaire des Tablettes de Tello conservées
au Musée Ottoman_ (Paris, E. Leroux, 1910), by FR. THUREAU-DANGIN and H.
DE GENOUILLAC.
But by far the largest part of the finds came into the hands of dealers,
and so into the museums of Europe and America; and these were published
sooner. Thus in 1891 some were reproduced by photography in DE SARZEC’S
_Découvertes en Chaldée_ (Paris, E. Leroux), plate 41. These tablets,
preserved in the Louvre, were, however, properly presented by the
Sultan. A great many thus acquired were published by THUREAU-DANGIN as
_Tablettes chaldéennes inédites_ in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, iv, pp.
69-86 (Paris, E. Leroux, 1897). In the same journal, v, pp. 67-102,
1902, he gave a _Notice sur la troisième collection de tablettes_, and
in 1903 published a _Recueil de tablettes chaldéennes_ (Paris, E.
Leroux), which gave improved editions of the above. Other articles
appeared in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, iii, pp. 118-46 (1895), iv, pp.
13-27 (1897), and in _Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions_ for
1896, by the same writer, pp. 355-61. These works not only made
available large numbers of texts, but also gave most important
contributions to their understanding.
In 1896 H. V. HILPRECHT published three of the tablets in the Imperial
Ottoman Museum at Constantinople in his _Old Babylonian Inscriptions_,
part II, nos. 124-6 (Philadelphia, _Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society_).
In _Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, etc., in the British
Museum_, vols. i, iii, v, vii, ix, x (London, British Museum), copied by
L. W. KING, 1896-1900; _Ancient Babylonian Temple Records_, copied by W.
R. ARNOLD (New York, Columbia University Press, 1896); _Old Babylonian
Temple Records_, are texts copied and discussed by R. J. LAU (New York,
Columbia University Press, 1906); _Haverford Library Collection of
Cuneiform Tablets or Documents from the Temple Archives of Telloh_, part
I, 1905; part II, 1909; part III, 1914 (Philadelphia, J. C. Winston
Co.), several hundreds of these texts appeared.
G. REISNER, in 1902, published _Tempelurkunden aus Telloh_ (Berlin, W.
Spemann), being the collection presented to the Berlin Museum by H.
SIMON. H. RADAU in his _Early Babylonian History_ (New York, 1903),
published and discussed a number purchased for the E. A. Hoffmann
collections in the New York Metropolitan Museum. T. G. PINCHES dealt
with _Some Case Tablets from Telloh_ in the _Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society_ for 1905, pp. 815-29, and, in 1909, published _The
Amherst Tablets_, being an _Account of the Babylonian Inscriptions in
the Collection of the Right Honourable Lord Amherst of Hackney, at
Didlington Hall, Norfolk_ (London, Quaritch). H. DE GENOUILLAC published
and discussed some texts of H. SCHLUMBERGER’S as _Tablettes d’Ur_ in the
_Hilprecht Anniversary Volume_, pp. 137-41. In 1911 T. G. PINCHES dealt
with some _Tablets from Telloh in Private Collections_ in _The Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society_, pp. 1039-62, and ST. LANGDON gave _Some
Sumerian Contracts_ in the _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, 1911, pp.
205-14. V. SCHEIL contributed a series of _Notes d’épigraphie et
d’archéologie assyriennes_ to the _Recueil de Travaux_ (Paris, E.
Bouillon), vol. xvii, 1895, pp. 28-30; xviii (1896), pp. 64-74; xix
(1897), pp. 44-64; xx (1898), pp. 55-72, 200-10; xxi (1899), pp. 26-9,
123-6; xxii (1900), pp. 27-39, 78-80, 149-61; xxiii (1901), pp. 18-23;
xxiv (1902), pp. 24-9, in which among other priceless records he gave
many extracts from the Telloh texts, some entire texts, and much
elucidation of the same. Special studies devoted to the subject are: H.
DE GENOUILLAC’S _Textes juridiques de l’époque d’Ur_ in the _Revue
d’Assyriologie_, 1911, pp. 1-32; H. DEIMEL’S _Studien zu C. T., I, III,
V, VII, IX, X_, in the _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, 1911, pp. 328-45;
_Sátilla, textes juridiques de la seconde dynastie d’Our_ in
_Babyloniaca_, iii, 1910, pp. 81-132, by F. PELÉGAUD, and _Di-tilla,
textes juridiques chaldéens de la seconde dynastie d’Our_, by C. H.
VIROLLEAUD (Poitiers, A. Boutifard, 1903); _Comptabilité chaldéenne_, by
the same author, same place and publisher, 1903, is a series of valuable
essays. G. A. BARTON gave _A Babylonian Ledger Account of Reeds and
Wood_ in the _American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures_,
1911, pp. 322-7, and in the same journal, 1912, pp. 207-10, another text
of the same sort.
Tablets of the same period have been found by the thousand at Jokha, the
ancient Umma, for centuries the hereditary foe of Telloh, and at Dréhem,
which seems to have been a closely dependent city of the Nippur
district. They have already found their way in large numbers to Europe
and America.
Tablets from Jokha were first noticed by V. SCHEIL in his _Notes
d’épigraphie et d’archéologie assyrienne_ in _Recueil de Travaux_, vol.
xix, pp. 62-3, 1897, who showed that Jokha was Umma. FR. THUREAU-DANGIN
in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_ (viii), 1911, pp. 152-8, who deals with
_Les noms des mois sur les tablettes de Djokha_, gives a number of these
texts from the time of the Dynasties of Akkad and Ur. ST. LANGDON has
published _A tablet from Umma in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford_ in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, 1913, pp. 47-52.
In contents these are very similar to the tablets from Telloh or Dréhem,
and seem to have been often confused with them by the dealers.
ST. LANGDON published _Tablets from the Archives of Dréhem_ (Paris,
Geuthner, 1912); L. DELAPORTE, _Tablettes de Dréhem in Revue
d’Assyriologie_, 1911, pp. 183-98; P. DHORME, _Tablettes de Dréhem à
Jérusalem_ in same journal, pp. 39-63; H. DE GENOUILLAC, _Tablettes de
Dréhem, publiées avec inventaire et tables_. _Musée du Louvre_ (Paris,
Geuthner, 1911), and _La trouvaille de Dréhem, Étude avec un choix de
textes de Constantinople et Bruxelles_ (Paris, Geuthner, 1911); see also
_Some Sumerian Contracts_, by ST. LANGDON, in the _Zeitschrift für
Assyriologie_, 1911, pp. 205-14. A useful summary is _Some Published
Texts from Dréhem_, by I. M. PRICE, in the _American Journal of Semitic
Languages and Literatures_, 1912, pp. 211-15.
_Sumerian Administrative Documents from the Second Dynasty of Ur_, from
the _Temple Archives of Nippur_, vol. iii, part i of Series A, Cuneiform
Texts, in _Publications of the Babylonian Expedition of the University
of Pennsylvania_ (Philadelphia, 1910), deals with closely related texts.
E. HUBER wrote _Die altbabylonischen Darlehenstexte aus der
Nippur-Sammlung im K. O. Museum in Konstantinopel_ as a contribution to
the _Hilprecht Anniversary Volume_, pp. 189-222. V. SCHEIL in his _Notes
d’épigraphie_ made some entries about those Nippur texts which reached
Constantinople, see p. 78.
An allied text was given by P. DHORME in the _Journal Asiatique_, 1912,
pp. 158-9, as _Un brouillon d’inventaire_.
The whole subject of these Temple Records is being studied by H.
TORCZYNER, who has started with _Vorläufige Bemerkungen_ to
_Altbabylonische Tempelrechnungen, umschrieben und erklärt_ in the
_Anzeiger der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien_, 1910,
pp. 136-40.
On the general scope and purpose of the Temple Records, see the article
on _Babylonian Book-keeping_, by A. T. CLAY, in the _American Journal of
Archaeology_, 1910, pp. 74 ff.
The very ancient texts from Telloh, usually called Pre-Sargonic, have
been issued, beside THUREAU-DANGIN’S _Recueil de Tablettes chaldéennes_,
by ALLOTTE DE LA FUŸE as _Documents présargoniques_ (Paris, E. Leroux,
1908, 1909). _Sumerian Tablets in the Harvard Semitic Museum_ was begun,
by MARY IDA HUSSEY, with part 1 in 1912. _Two Tablets of the Period of
Lugalanda_ were published by ST. LANGDON in _Babyloniaca_, 1911, pp.
246-7. Much the most useful publication, however, is _Tablettes
sumériennes archaïques_, by H. DE GENOUILLAC (Paris, Geuthner, 1909),
which gives not only texts, but transcriptions and such translation as
is possible, and also an admirable account of all they imply, as to law
and custom. A considerable amount of this is strikingly like the later
laws. In _The Amherst Tablets_ (London, Quaritch, 1908), T. G. PINCHES
published a few more. The bulk of them still await publication.
_Ancient Bullae and Seals of Shirpurla_ by N. P. LIKHATSCHEFF, published
in the _Imperial Russian Archaeological Society’s Classical Section IV_,
pp. 225-63, 1907, written in Russian, gives a number of similar tablets.
_Oriental Antiquities_, by M. V. NIKOLSKY, in the _Oriental Commission
of the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society_, iii, Series 2, 1908, has
over 300 such texts. These appear to belong to the same period.
Some valuable discussions will be found in _État des décès survenus dans
le personnel de la déesse Bau sous le règne d’Urukagina_, by ALLOTTE DE
LA FUŸE, in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, 1910, pp. 139-46.
In his _Recueil de Tablettes chaldéennes_ (Paris, E. Leroux, 1903) FR.
THUREAU-DANGIN gave as his third series a number of texts of the
Sargonic period, dated in the reigns of Shargani-shar-ali and Naram-Sin.
A number more are published or described in the _Inventaire des
tablettes de Tello conservées au Musée Impérial Ottoman_, Tome I, by
THUREAU-DANGIN, 1910, and Tome II, by H. DE GENOUILLAC, 1911, and
several other collections are to be published shortly.
The very early texts from the ancient Shuruppak which have reached the
Louvre were published by THUREAU-DANGIN in his _Recueil_ named above,
and in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, vi (1904), pp. 143-54, he wrote
_Contrats archaïques provenant de Shuruppak_, with the intention of
deciphering and explaining them as far as possible.