The area of study of this paper,1 unlike Egypt to the west, and Syria and Mesopotamia to the north and east, has yet to produce a proper archive of cuneiform texts, although archaeologists and others have discovered around ninety cuneiform objects over the past century or so. Yet, due to the uneven pace of discovery and changing political and academic realities in the region over the years, no attempt has ever been made to study these cuneiform objects as a group, and the last published list of the relevant material was that of K. Galling in Textbuch zur Geschichte Israels in 1968.2 At present not only is there no comprehensive edition or bibliography of the cuneiform texts in our corpus, but there is not even an accurate list, leaving the materials largely inaccessible to most scholars. Our current project, "Cuneiform in The Land of Israel and Canaan," is intended to answer this need. The main goal of the project is the publication of a book that will include an introduction to the topic, editions of the inscriptions with philological notes, indexes, new handcopies, and photographs.3 We present here the first fruits of our endeavors: a bibliographical list of our corpus with a brief summary of our findings to date. INTRODUCTION TODAY WE ARE ABLE to place eighty-nine objects in our corpus. These range from well-known texts such as the Taanach letters, which have been studied and translated a number of times (Taanach 1-2, 5-6), to mere scraps of clay, and include texts belonging to a wide variety of genres, including literature, royal inscriptions, letters, administrative texts, inscribed cylinder seals, lexical texts, mathematical texts, omens, and a magical/medical text. Also participating in various stages of the project were DeLafayette Awkward, Yehudah Kaplan, Ralf Rothenbusch, Yoav Shor, and Peter Stein. The authors wish to thank numerous scholars and others who freely gave their time and support to the project. We cannot thank them ball by name here, but special thanks are due to Osnat Brandel of the Israel Museum, Omit Ilan at the Rockefeller Museum, and Gary Beckman of the University of Michigan for facilitating the study of tablets in museum collections. The project is funded in part by Israel Academy of Sciences, Humanities; and the Israel Science Foundation. Abbreviations are as in The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD). In addition, note: BAR = Biblical Archaeology Review; BN = Biblische Notizen; NEAEHL = The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in The Holy Land; SAAB = State Archives of Assyria Bulletin. More than a third of the inscribed objects come from three sites: Taanach (17), Hazor (15), and Aphek (8). Samaria has yielded six objects, including late fourthcentury coins,4 while Megiddo has yielded five, but only one cuneiform tablet.5 No other site has provided more than four items. In fact, a majority of sites have contributed only an item or two. Sites yielding epigraphic finds range from Hazor in the north to Beer Sheva in the south, and from Ashkelon and Ashdod on the Mediterranean...
A very unusual literary tablet, Kt. j/k 97 from Kültepe, was published by C. Günbattı in 1997. It is inscribed with what already the first editor described as an Old Assyrian version of legends about Sargon. Since then the tablet has caused a good deal of discussion. Translations or editions have been made by M. Van De Mieroop (2000), K. Hecker (2001), B. Foster (2002, 2005), A. Cavigneaux (2005), and J. G. Dercksen (2005). These studies represent extremely different approaches: Hecker takes the text at face value and reads it as a laudatory royal inscription, whereas others see it as a kind of parody of inscriptions or legends about Sargon (Van De Mieroop 2000; Foster 2002, 2005), inspired by Mario Liverani. Dercksen (2005: 108) goes to the opposite extreme, stating that the “supposedly literary character of the text can be ignored, as this modern concept was alien to OA society”. He sees the text as “not a parody”, but instead as having “functioned to extol Sargon of Akkad during kispum celebrations that were part of the official cult of Assur”. Cavigneaux's study suggests a middle way between these extremes.The tablet was found — and probably written — in Anatolia within the community of Assyrian merchants living abroad in Kaneš, on a tablet that looks very much like a normal business letter. It was excavated in 1958 in the house of Aḫ-šalim, an ordinary merchant, from whose house a number of other texts have been published. It alludes to the legend Sargon King of Battle, in which, following M. Liverani (1993: 52–6), Cavigneaux understands an expedition of Sargon to Anatolia, aided by the merchants of Purušḫaddum, as in fact referring to the Old Assyrian colonization in Anatolia. Cavigneaux further suggests what kind of situation lies behind our text (2005: 596): “Le nouveau texte … suggère de manière très concrète que les marchands assyriens berçaient leurs soirées au coin de la cheminée, au long des hivers anatoliens, d'histoires dont les rois d'Akkad étaient les héros”. He sees the text as an unicum, with hardly any chances of ever finding a duplicate (p. 597).
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