The Nimrud Letters, 1952: Part VIII

Abstract

It is appropriate that the eleven letters here published, mostly concerned with imperial and military administration in the Assyrian Empire, should be dedicated to my teacher Professor Sidney Smith on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday, since to him I owe both the origin of my interest in this subject, and also invaluable assistance in my initial steps towards the interpretation of letters of this collection.This publication, like that of previous sections of my ‘Nimrud Letters, 1952’, is to be taken as provisional only, since there still remain to be edited and published almost another hundred letters or fragments of letters, the contents of which may throw further light upon letters already published or necessitate some modifications of conclusions previously drawn from them. I am planning to publish all the Nimrud Letters in book form, with full grammatical and historical discussions, and to assist towards this project I have already collated all those Nimrud Letters previously published which are now in the Baghdad Museum; since these letters have been cleaned since I originally copied them, collation has in a number of instances produced improved readings.