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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.

Who were the Babylonian priests? How did they identify themselves? And can we track them down in the cuneiform sources? This thesis presents an investigation into Babylonian society, focusing on the priestly community of the city of Borsippa during Neo-Babylonian (circa 620-539 BCE) and early Persian rule (circa 538-484 BCE). The political changes affecting Babylonia - the area of present-day central and southern Iraq - during that time provide the backdrop for this study. Focusing on the complex network of social interactions that existed between priestly families, this studies draws on sociological theories, studies of anthropology and social network analysis. This research aims to provide a better understanding of the Babylonian priesthood, not so much as servants of the gods, but as a distinct social group within Babylonian society at large.

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

A diachronic survey of the Sumerian ideas about Beginnings __ cosmogony, theogony and anthropogeny __ is described. Third millennium Sumerian texts describe the 'marriage' of the primaeval pair an and ki __ Heaven and Earth, thereafter the sky god An and the mother goddess Nin__ursa_a __ and the birth of their children: gods. From the second millennium onwards the Sumerian culture disappeared, except from the scribal schools; there was an increasing Semitic influence. The beginning became a primaeval ocean, Namma who gave birth to an-ki. Later the pair Aps_ and Ti'amat produced heaven and earth __ not yet in their final form __ and the ancestors of An. Aps_ and Ti'amat were killed. Marduk gave heaven and earth their final appearance with both halves of Ti'amat's body. In the Sumerian myth 'Enki and Ninma__', man is created with the aid of clay (Enki's idea), and borne by Namma. In the Akkadian text atra-__as_s a god is killed; with his flesh and blood together with clay man was created. The purpose of the creation of man was always the same: the gods do not want to provide for themselves; the maintenance of the gods is man's daily duty.

The study attempts to reconstruct aspects of the culture and knowledge transfer as involved in the import of cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia to Anatolia and Syria in the Late Bronze Age. It therefore analyzes the manuscripts called 'lexical lists' that were excavated at the Anatolian and Syrian sites of Hattusha, Ugarit, and Emar. Lexical lists are structured, often bilingual or multilingual lists of words and cuneiform signs; they were the essential tools of scribal education in that period. The analysis follows three main research foci, i.e., (1) the geographical transmission of the lists from Mesopotamia to Anatolia and Syria ('long-distance transmissional context'), (2) their local reproduction at the mentioned sites ('short-distance transmissional context'), as well as (3) their role within the actual education procedures ('functional context'). Thereby, the analysis particularly takes into consideration t he specific role that oral vs. writing-based techniques of transmission played within those processes.

The dissertation is a history of the early states of the region known nowadays as Kurdistan. The first emergence of these states in the written records of Mesopotamia and its neighbours. The history of the region in the period covered by the dissertation is scarcely known and studied, but the discovery of new inscriptional material and some archaeological finds, made it possible to write this history and study the development of the petty states into a unified empire towards the period covered by this work, i.e. in about 1500 BC.

This four-part work provides a philological analysis and a theoretical interpretation of the cuneiform lexical texts found in the Late Bronze Age city of Emar, in present-day Syria. These word and sign lists, commonly dated to around 1100 BC, were almost all found in the archive of a single school. They served to educate apprentice scribes in the Ancient Mesopotamian ‘science of writing’, the basics skills of which included the learning of Sumerian logograms and acquisition of vocabulary in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the Near East. Part 1 provides a new edition of the individual texts. Part 2 gives a composite edition of the specific lexical compositions to which these texts belong, including English translations and systematic references to parallel material. Part 3 gives a synchronic analysis of the formal and organizational structure of the lexical series - in addition it contains a new analysis of the scribal redaction notes and an excursus on the diachronic position of the Emar corpus within the overall lexical tradition. Part 4 provides a theoretical interpretation of the Emar lexical texts based on three models developed in the social sciences: Foucault’s epistemological model, Goody’s ‘technological’ model and Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist model.

Sumerian is an ancient Near Eastern language which was spoken in what is now southern Iraq. It is known to us from numerous inscriptions and clay tablets written in cuneiform, a script invented by the Sumerians in the late fourth millennium BC. Although Sumerian became obsolete as a living language about four thousand years ago, it continued to be used as a language of scholarship and cult until the end of the first millennium BC. Sumerian is a language isolate. Its position in a remote corner of the Near East shows it to be a last remnant of the languages that preceded the arrival of Semitic languages in the area. This grammar describes the Sumerian language on the basis of written sources dating from about 2500 to 2000 BC.

This thesis deals with the record management of the Hittite Empire (ca. 1650-1180 BCE). Starting point is the clay tablet itself: its physical features and its colophon. In the Hittite capital Hattusa altogether some 30,000 tablets and mostly tablet fragments have been found on several locations. These tablets span the whole period of the Empire and hold various text genres, ranging from historical texts, letters and inventories to oracle inquiries and festival descriptions. This research has analyzed the physical characteristics of the Hittite tablets. As has been demonstrated, certain conventions regarding their shape and layout surely existed, which could depend on the content of the composition, as well as the time period in which the tablet was written. The research further includes a text edition and analysis of the Hittite colophon, a subscript found at the end of the composition containing metadata of the composition, such as the title, scribe and series number of the tablet. Both the distribution and the content of these colophons are very consistent they are likely to have played a crucial role in the organization of the Hittite tablet collections.

The study focuses on prophecy as a historical phenomenon by offering a comparison between parts of First Isaiah and the Assyrian prophecies. In the first part of the study the material from First Isaiah and from seventh-century Assyria is investigated in its own right. The second part is a comparison of the Isaiah tradition in its earliest shape on the one hand and the prophetic material from seventh-century Assyria on the other. The comparison contains three aspects: the interrelation of prophetic oracles and historical events; the functions of the prophets; and the literary development of prophecy. The main conclusion of the study is that the earliest stages of the Isaiah tradition - i.e. the prophetic material from the eighth century and its earliest revision in the seventh century - to a great extent correspond with the prophetic material of seventh-century Assyria. Based on this conclusion, the hypothesis that prophecy as a historical phenomenon in ancient Israel was much more in conformity with prophecy in the ancient Near East in general than the biblical sources at face value suggest, gains further support.