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Assyrians and Arameans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

A. R. Millard
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Extract

Since the birth of Assyriology there has been recognized at the heart of the neo-Assyrian empire what J. N. Postgate has termed “the symbiosis of Aramaic and Assyrian writing systems”. In 1865 Sir Henry Rawlinson published several cuneiform tablets bearing notes in Aramaic on their edges. These notes were often written with a reed pen while the clay was still soft, the fibres of the point leaving their distinct marks in the clay (e.g. the two examples illustrated in Iraq 34 (1972), Plate LIVb, c). It may be that other notes were written in ink on hardened tablets, but have been erased in the course of time. Certainly ink was used for annotations on tablets in the neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, applied after the clay had dried, as it had been long before by the Egyptian clerks at El-Amarna. While the ink notes could have been added at any time after the tablets were inscribed, far from the places where the tablets were written, those applied while the clay was damp were clearly contemporary with the writing of the cuneiform, and originated in the same place. The purpose of these notes is clear: they were dockets or labels to identify the documents, such as “quittance deed of Hazael” (Iraq 34, 134–7). Their presence in the citadel at Nineveh implies there were scribes at work there who could not read cuneiform, yet who would need to distinguish one document from another. Nineveh is the only known provenance for such dockets, although there are some which have reached museums without any information about their discovery (the Hazael deed mentioned, a deed for the division of an inheritance now in Copenhagen, a corn loan in private hands, and a text in Brussels).

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , Spring 1983 , pp. 101 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1983

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References

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