Commentary

About three thousand letters have been recovered from the royal archives of the Sargonid Dynasty (721–609 bce) at Nineveh. Half of them were published by Harper (1892–1914) under the title of Assyrian and Babylonian Letters (hence  ABL ), and translated by Waterman (1930–36) and, in part, by Pfeiffer (1935). The whole corpus is being reedited by the State Archives of Assyria (SAA) project (Helsinki); see for now SAA…