New Sumerian Literary Texts from Tell Haddad (Ancient Meturan): A First Survey

Abstract

The excavations of the State Organization in Tell Haddad-Meturan were part of the great salvage project in the Hamrin area. Though they were conducted under difficult circumstances they were amongst the most fruitful enterprises of the project, especially from the epigraphic point of view. Among other things a relatively large number of tablets from the OB period was excavated. Most of them are Akkadian and of economic content, and will be published in due course by several of our colleagues. A fragment of the “Laws of Ešnunna” has already been published by one of us (F. Al-Rawi, Sumer 38 [1983], 117–120). There is also a certain number of lexical texts, but the greatest surprise was caused by the discovery of a relatively large number of Sumerian “literary” texts (in the broad sense of the term literary, including magic etc.), the first important find of this kind since the Ur excavations (cf. Gadd and Kramer, UET VI/I and VI/2), and the first made by an Iraqi excavation. We have had the great privilege to be entrusted with the publication of these tablets. They will soon be published in a TIM (Texts from the Iraq Museum) volume under the authority of the State Organization, some particularly important pieces being also edited independently in separate articles. We will undertake here a survey specifically of the Sumerian corpus; to clarify the exposition we shall also use a small part of the information kindly communicated to us by the excavators and by the colleagues who are studying the rest of the tablets, though this is not an anticipation of the final publication, either archaeological or philological. Once all the texts are published there will remain an interesting study to be done about their precise dating, and their grouping into coherent archives, also no doubt interesting conclusions on the function of the texts and of the buildings. Such study will be made possible by the exact documenting of the find-spots of each individual text, even of small fragments, which has been made by the excavators.

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