Nuzi Texts and Their Uses as Historical Evidence

Ancient Nuzi, buried beneath modern Yorghan Tepe in northern Iraq, is a Late Bronze Age town belonging to the kingdom of Arrap a that has yielded between 6,500 and 7,000 legal, economic and administrative tablets, all belonging to a period of some five generations (ca. 1475 1350 B.C.E.) and almost all from known archaeological contexts. The tablets were excavated from the government administrative complexes, from houses in all the urban neighborhoods, from each of the suburban villas, and even a few dozen from the temple complex. These Akkadian-language documents include contracts for labor, deeds of sale, testamentary wills, slave sales, ration lists, inter-office memoranda, trial records, scholastic texts, and much more. The ninety-six texts presented here in transliteration and translation are divided into five groups dealing with topics of historical interest: Nuzi and the political force responsible for its demise; the crimes and trials of a mayor of Nuzi; a multigenerational legal struggle over title to a substantial amount of land; the progressive enrichment of one family at the expense of another through a series of real estate transactions; and the nature of the ilku, a real estate tax whose dynamic is crucial in defining the economic and social structure of Nuzi as a whole.