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B**M
Just the beginning, but will be definitive.
This is the first of what will be four volumes of the royal inscriptions of the last major Assyrian ruler - Ashurbanipal, and one of the volumes will cover the inscriptions of his two brief successors, Assur-etel-ilani and Sin-sarra-ishkun.Assyrian kings were copius builders, and pretty bombastic self-publicists. They tend to give a statement about their recent deeds, before going on to describe what they have built or how they have honoured the gods. Later in their reign they would summarise or edit their earlier deeds, sometimes dropping things out, and their inscriptions are often dated to a particular year, by means of reference to the limmu, the official who gave his name to the year. Ashurbanipal's inscriptions are given alphatebetic identifiers, Prism A, B etc. If there are several very similar texts with only minor variations they are known as C1, C2, C3 e.t.c. Volume 1 includes the transliterations and translations of 20 clay prisms, 1 clay cylinder, 2 stone slabs, and 34 epigrams, which communicate details about the many scenes in the stone-work within Ashurbanipal's palaces and temples. There are then about three dozen other types of inscription, many quite brief. On brief appraisal the longer inscriptions cover at least eight of Ashurbanipal's campaigns, and therefore much of his first twenty years. Some have been recently translated in the State Archives of Assyria Cuniform Text X, namely prism I and T, 2014, and others were translated by Piepkorn, namely E,B,D,C,F and A in 1933. For a composite text, which covers the entire reign, George Smith's The history of Ashurbanipal, will still give a pretty good over view of his reign. When finished, which I hope it will be, the RINAP series will give a complete account of the formal documents of the Assyrian state.
M**H
Good research tool for historians
Very thorough. A true research tool for historians. But without autographs accompanying the transliterations, and translation work not much use to students trying to learn to read actual cuneiform tablets, or even linguists wanting to offer alternative readings.
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