Nu Ma

A Year of Vengeance

Despite siginificant advances in annual chronology, the Old Assyrian trade fundamentally lacked a regime of time at the level of the merchant’s commercial and personal activities. In this book, Stratford sets out to recapture time through narrative, drawing on the relationship between the two described by the philosopher Paul Ricouer. Investigating a possible case of revenge leads to weaving together more than a hundred mostly undated documents to form a narrative within the course of a single year of vengeance, including trade disruptions, illnesses, and commerce. This process demonstrates relationships between document and material context, and time and narrative. Along the way, Old Assyrian commercial time and its tempos become more clear, leading to descriptions of the scale of the trade and the nature of Old Assyrian archives as they have survived. Ultimately, the Assyrians involved appear as the earliest historical individuals in world history. The treatment of Šalim-aḫum’s apparent revenge comprises a practicuum in historical interpretation in the ancient world of interest to practitioners and theoreticians of both the ancient world and world history.

Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology

Letters in the British Museum

This book is the thirteenth volume in the series Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Übersetzung, which wants to make the many — often dispersed — letters from the Old Babylonian period available in transliteration and translation. Volume 13 is the second in a short series of hitherto unpublished material in the British Museum. One more volume is planned. The letters presented in this volume come from various collections and form different groups. The most important of these groups contains 45 letters dealing with the administration in Larsa at the time of king Hammurabi. A large portion of these letters was sent by Hammurabi himself. Of the other groups of letters two are of special interest. The first one consists of just four letters which give a vivid picture of the problems around the building of a house at Sippar. The second contains letters sent either to or from the city of Kish. The senders are partly known from other texts, specifically the ones published in volume 10. Orientalists and specialists in Assyriology as well as historians will benefit from this publication.