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PREFACE
The so-called Nimrud Letters were the first Neo-Assyrian documents that
I was able to acquaint myself with in the autumn of 1995. At that time,
Professor Simo Parpola was teaching an introductory course on the Neo-Assyrian
language at the University of Helsinki. The Nimrud Letters came as
an unexpected shock for an undergraduate student who had only been studying
Old Babylonian before this. This new experience was not just bewilderment,
but also something that one might call love at first sight, or at least
a challenge that started to vex my mind. As much as these letters fascinated
me by their variable contents then, they have been doing so in many different
ways ever after; and there is no reason to pretend that this process will be
over with the publication of this volume.
Thanks to the pioneering work of the late H. W. F. Saggs, all the important
letters from Calah (Nimrud) have been accessible to Assyriologists in marvellous
hand copies since 2001. Nevertheless, apart from his copies, his
edition of these letters left a lot of room for improvement, and with the
publication of the present volume, we hope to present more reliable interpretations
of these important letters and clarify several details pertinent to the
reign of Tiglath-pileser III in particular.
It needs to be specified that before Saggs’ The Nimrud Letters, 1952
appeared in 2001, he had already published 105 of these letters between
1955-1974 in the journal Iraq. They were transliterated and entered into the
Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project’s database by Parpola in the 1970s. After
2001, with The Nimrud Letters, 1952, the transliterations of these 105 Assyrian
and Babylonian letters were updated according to the cuneiform copies
of Saggs’ new volume (aka CTN 5) and all the previously unpublished letters
were added to the Helsinki database. This was done in collaboration with
Parpola and me.
I want to express my most sincere thanks to my teacher and mentor Simo
Parpola without whose experience and expertise this volume would not have
been published. Moreover, I have been able to discuss these letters with him
on several occasions over the years, ever since his introductory course on the
Neo-Assyrian language in 1995. It has been an indescribable honour and a
comforting feeling to have him “on my side” in this project: with his unstinting
efforts, he was always ready to correct mistakes and suggest improvements
to the manuscript. In fact, this Nimrud Letters volume is the outcome
of a truly collaborative project between Simo and me.
My thanks are also due to Prof. F. M. Fales with whom I have been able to
discuss some specific issues of the corpus. It was also through him that I got
to know his pupil Devis Morasset, who, in 2005, had just prepared his
Master’s thesis on the Nimrud Letters. Therefore, we felt it natural to collaborate
in preparing the Introduction to this volume. In 2006, Devis wrote the
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