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Publication of Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform texts in private collections from various periods: Presargonic: letter-unknown provenance in Northern Babylonia Ur III: administrative document-Umma) Old Assyrian: letters-Kaneš (Anatolia) Old Babylonian: lexical series Ugumu-unknown provenance; contract-unknown provenance; silver loan-Southern Mesopotamia; administrative-Southern Mesopotamia.

This thesis is a philological study of redemption as it was practiced in Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000-1600 BC). It reconstructs, edits, and analyses texts and private archives showing the working of this traditional right in a number of local traditions in the Old Babylonian period. It contributes to the study of redemption of persons a philological treatment of key technical terms. The traditional right of redemption also had a royal analogue, and chapter 4 of the thesis provides a critical treatment of a putative royal edict from the kingdom of Larsa mandating redemption based on a new classification of the text.

The aklu documents are accounts of the commodities like beer, flour, sheep. But usually we can not find any verb such as "received" or "gave" in them. Therefore the exact meaning of the documents remains to be determined. In this study, I made a profile of the persons appear in the documents according to their seal impressions. By observing the characteristics of the groups of the seal impressions, we can find that artisans prepared the commodities and that the members of a few prominet Akkadian families sealed the documents.

My dissertation examines the sociocultural underpinnings of name-giving by speakers of Semitic languages, focusing on the component of the onomasticon derived from animal names. The study deals with three language groups: (1) Akkadian, (2) Northwest Semitic (i.e., Amorite, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Phoenician), and (3) Arabic (classical and modern sources). The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) The occurrence of animal names in every corpus points to a common Semitic background imbued with metaphoric, affective, and apotropaic aspects. There is, however, no evidence for totemism. (2) Whereas names of herbivorous animals (wild and domestic) are found in every language examined, names of venomous animals, predators, and raptors are much more attested in West Semitic, especially Arabic, than in Akkadian, and this is apparently related to the symbolic nature of names within the social ideology of a society. (3) The survival of animal names in modern Arabic practices, specifically among nomads, points to an adherence to ‘pre-Islamic’ naming methods vis-à-vis normative Islamic views. These findings contribute to the discussion about naming in general and in the context of Semitic linguistic in particular.

The Amorites are known throughout the history of the Ancient Near East: they occur in texts from the Ur III empire (2100–2000 bc), but also in the Bible. In the Old Babylonian period (2000–1600 bc), several dynasties of Amorite kings ruled all over the Middle East. They came to power in the early Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1800 bc).This thesis explores several aspects of these Early Old Babylonian Amorites. A philological and bibliographical chapter shows the state of research up until now. The role that ‘Amorites’ had in texts from the period is explored, as well as the matter of Amorite ethnicity and their distribution among the local population.The main part of this thesis is in the last chapters where the role of the Amorites and Amorite rulers in the early Old Babylonian period is reappraised