Overview

Letters from Old Babylonian Kish presents the primary publication of previously unstudied letters from the Old Babylonian Period. Drawing on internal and external evidence, the volume illuminates connections between these letters and other tablets housed in collections in Europe and the USA. The result is the reconstruction of a virtual archive of more than 200 letters from Old Babylonian Kish. Until at least 1600 BC, the compiled archive represents the largest group of related letters from southern Mesopotamia. Although these letters moved into various museums through the antiquities market in the early 1900s, many remained unstudied and unpublished, despite providing many pristine examples of personal and professional correspondence. The study of scribal hands and habits has been aided by the gathering of so many related letters, allowing the identification of four distinct scribal hands. The volume includes an extensive introduction, treating Old Babylonian epistolography and scribal hands.

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9780198817581

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J. Nicholas Reid is Professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, where he also directs the Hybrid MDiv Program. He continues to maintain a research affiliation with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, where he served as a Visiting Scholar after doctoral work at Oxford University. He primarily works on topics of social history and unpublished cuneiform tablets. Klaus Wagensonner is Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Assyriology at Yale University. He specializes in Sumerian literature and (early) lexicography in Mesopotamia. His PhD at the University of Vienna (2016) was a study on knowledge organization in the earliest cuneiform word lists. Between 2011 and 2015, he was part of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). Between 2019 and 2022, he conducted the NEH-funded full digitization of the cuneiform artifacts housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection. He is currently working on a translation project, whose aim is to make the rich textual record in the Babylonian Collection accessible for a wider audience.

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