ABSTRACT
The innumerable documents that can be used for the study of the Mesopotamian economy are mostly published in a format only accessible to Assyriologists. Most commonly, texts are rendered in a hand-drawn copy of the original cuneiform tablet, without a transliteration or translation. Publication series of all major tablet collections use this format, including Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum (58 volumes), Musée du Louvre. Département des antiquités orientales. Textes cunéiformes (31 volumes), Yale Oriental Series: Babylonian Texts (18 volumes), Baby lonian Inscriptions in the Collection of James B.Nies, Yale University (10 volumes), Texts in the Iraq Museum (11 volumes), and others. Many of the excavation projects have their publication series of excavated texts (e.g. Ur Excavations: Texts, 9 volumes), and numerous articles of selected materials presented in similar fashion exist (e.g. in such periodicals as Journal of Cuneiform Studies). Many of the above listed publications also include noneconomic texts published in hand-copies only. New technology will probably make this format of publication obsolete in the near future as scanning by computer is becoming less expensive. To the layman the simple rendering of an original cuneiform tablet is obviously uninformative, but it remains the fastest way of making large collections accessible to the scholar. There are few recent publications that attempt to translate large groups of economic documents and contracts. An early attempt at translating all Old Babylonian texts of this type is Kohler and Ungnad (1909-23). For neo-Assyrian imperial archival texts, see Fales and Postgate (1992 and 1995). Entire archives are sometimes published in transliteration and translation, e.g. Postgate (1988).
