Texts and Fragments

Abstract

The museum of the Kibbutz of Bar-Am' in the Galilee has recently acquired a large collection of antiquities and various objets d'art from a private collector in Haifa, Mr. Moshe Bar-David. The collection includes sixteen cuneiform tablets from the Ur III period and a building inscription on a clay cone of Sin-kigid from the Larsa period. The authorities of the Bar-Am Museum have kindly invited me to work on these tablets and prepare them for publication. I wish to thank the curator of the museum, Mr. J. Nasi, for placing the tablets at my disposal for a considerable length of time so that I could work on them at my leisure. I thank also my student, Mr. E. Baruch, for having called my attention to the tablets and arranging for me to publish them. Most of the tablets are economic and administrative tablets of the Ur III period from the Umma and Drehem archives. They include receipts and disbursements of animals (dead and alive, nos. 1-9), deliveries of food offerings to various shrines (no. 13), and records of male workers hired to do agricultural work (nos. 10-11). One tablet (bearing the registration no. 366/q2) seems to record a legal protocol concerning a (hired?) plowing ox and a boat loaded with barley. All the accounts except the last mentioned, which will be published separately in the near future, are reproduced here in copy, in the hope that they may be of some value to specialists in the field.