An Early Old Babylonian Loan Document

Abstract

In his Catalogue of the Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, published in 1961, H. Figulla included a short note about the Old Babylonian archival text BM 14049. Although available only in this abbreviated form, this seemingly simple loan text, written in the standard form of such documents, has been cited numerous times in the current Akkadian dictionaries, often in contradictory fashion. The reason for this is that although the text is formally predictable, it contains an unusually high number of philological problems. The provenience and exact date of the tablet are unknown although on paleographic grounds it can be stated that the text was written during the earlier part of the Old Babylonian period. My attention was drawn to this tablet as result of my interest in Amorite tribal designations, since it appeared from the original transliteration that an Amorite personal tribal name might in fact be included in the enigmatic year name of the document. Collation of the original demonstrated that this was not the case but the proliferation of contradictory readings encountered in the dictionaries prompted me to copy the tablet and to present an edition of the text.'