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STATE ARCHIVES OF ASSYRIA XIX
grammatical point of view; it is not uncommon for him to offer ungrammatical
solutions for more difficult passages. Many of these problematic passages
have been disentangled and every effort has been taken to make both transliterations
and translations as accurate as possible. In addition, an extraordinary
decision of CTN 5 was to publish the letters without sequential numbers,
a detail which has made referring to the volume a cumbersome task.
The transliterations, addressed to the specialist, render the text of the
originals in Roman characters according to standard Assyriological conventions
in the customary SAA style. Results of collation are indicated with
exclamation or question marks. Single exclamation marks indicate corrections
to published copies, double exclamation marks, scribal errors. Question
marks indicate uncertain or questionable readings. Broken portions of the text
and all restorations are enclosed within square brackets. Parentheses enclose
items omitted by ancient scribes. Numbers that appear at the edge of a break
where part of the number might be missing are followed by “[+X” or preceded
by “X+],” and it must be borne in mind that “X” may be zero. Unlike in CTN
5, the line counts on the obverse and the reverse are always separately
numbered. Uncertain or conjectural translations are indicated by italics.
Interpretative additions to the translation are enclosed within parentheses. All
restorations are enclosed within square brackets. Untranslatable passages are
indicated by dots.
Month names are rendered by their Hebrew equivalents, followed by a
Roman numeral (in parentheses) indicating the place of the month within the
lunar year. Personal, divine and geographical names are rendered by English
or Biblical equivalents if a well-established equivalent exists (e.g., Merodach-baladan,
Tiglath-pileser, Calah); otherwise, they are given in transcription
with length marks deleted except for circumflex in the final position (e.g.,
Nabû, Ašipâ, etc.). The normalisation of West-Semitic names follows PNA.
The rendering of professions is a compromise between the use of accurate
but impractical Assyrian terms and inaccurate but practical modern or classical
equivalents.
Critical Apparatus
The critical apparatus has been considerably expanded over what has been
the norm in the previous letter volumes of the series because of the importance
of these letters and their recent edition by Saggs. Since, at the time of
publication of this volume, CTN 5 (2001) is not more than eleven years old,
extra effort has been put into the critical apparatus of this volume in order to
substantiate arguments and readings that deviate from Saggs’ edition. Nevertheless,
the mistakes that appeared in CTN 5 are not systematically listed,
although occasionally these may be pointed out. It should be noted that the
purpose of the critical apparatus is not to list or collect errors that appeared
in CTN 5; in practice, it would appear pointless and counterproductive,
resulting in a non-user friendly edition.
The primary purpose of the critical apparatus is to support the readings and
translations established in the edition, and as in the previous volumes, it
contains references to collations of questionable passages, scribal mistakes
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