ABSTRACT
The number of books and articles dealing with royal inscriptions in general is enormous. Publications and translations of these texts dominated the field of Mesopotamian studies in its early decades. For Assyria, the two-volume collection of translations by Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, University of Chicago Press, volume I, 1926, volume II, 1927, presents a capping stone of that work. Babylonian and Sumerian inscriptions never were presented in a similar fashion in translation only. A series entitled Vorderasiatische Bibliothek initiated in Leipzig in 1907 intended to make every text of relevance to the history of the (Asiatic) ancient Near East available in transliteration and German translation, and had an ambitious schedule including all Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian royal inscriptions. The project seems to have been terminated due to the First World War, and only the contributions on Sumerian-Akkadian (Thureau-Dangin 1907), Achaemenid (Weissbach 1911), and Neo-Babylonian (Langdon 1912) royal inscriptions, as well as an edition of all Assurbanipal texts (Streck 1916) were completed.
