Knowledge and Power Updated

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Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

In the seventh century BC the Assyrian monarch was the most powerful human being in the whole Middle East. Hundreds of letters, queries and reports show scholars advising the Assyrian royal family on matters ominous, astrological and medical, often with direct impact on political affairs. Along with court poetry and royal prophecies, they give an extraordinary vivid insight into the actual practice of scholarship in the context of the first well-documented courtly patronage of scientific activity in world history.

These Assyrian scholarly writings - letters, poetry, queries and reports - were published in eight edited volumes which are now out of print or difficult to get hold of:

• A. Livingstone, Assyrian court poetry and literary miscellanea (State Archives of Assyria 3), Helsinki 1989
• I. Starr, Queries to the Sungod: divination and politics in Sargonid Assyria (State Archives of Assyria 4), Helsinki 1990
• H. Hunger, Astrological reports to Assyrian kings (State Archives of Assyria 8), Helsinki 1992
• S. Parpola, Assyrian prophecies (State Archives of Assyria 9), Helsinki 1997
• S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian scholars (State Archives of Assyria 10), Helsinki 1993
• S. Cole and P. Machinist, Letters from priests to kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (State Archives of Assyria 13), Helsinki 1999
• M. Luukko and G. Van Buylaere, The political correspondence of Esarhaddon (State Archives of Assyria 16), Helsinki 2002
• F. Reynolds, The Babylonian correspondence of Esarhaddon (State Archives of Assyria 18), Helsinki 2003

With the kind permission of the authors and the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project [http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/], this project brings together translations and transliterations of all 2100 of these texts. We have also added a wealth of material from our undergraduate lectures and seminars to support our own teaching and to provide resources for colleagues in history of science and religion who do not have access to specialist libraries.

• Essentials
• Cuneiform Revealed
• Letters, queries, and reports
• Highlights
• Teaching resources
• Bibliography
• People, gods & places
• Technical terms
• External resources
• About the project

2010 updates (from a communication of the editors distributed on the Agade mailing list 2/1/2011):

The site now provides online access to another 450 letters from the
reign of Esarhaddon of Assyria (681-669 BC), as originally published
by M. Luukko & G. Van Buylaere, The political correspondence of
Esarhaddon (State Archives of Assyria 16, 2002) and F. Reynolds, The
Babylonian correspondence of Esarhaddon (State Archives of Assyria 18,
2003).

We would like to thank the authors and copyright holders for their
permission to make the material available online and the Helsinki
Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project for providing the ASCII files used to
produce the original volumes.

The site now covers the cuneiform texts from the reigns of the
Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal as published in eight
volumes of the State Archives of Assyria series (vol. 3, 4, 8, 9, 10,
13, 16 and 18).

In addition, it includes the following new features:

• Addenda and corrigenda for SAA 18 by Fran Reynolds.
• Essentials: two new illustrated essays, on the city of Nineveh and
the reign of king Sennacherib.
• Highlights: further photographs of featured cheap viagra from the British
Museum, bringing the total to 30.
• People, Gods, and Places: many hundreds of new or updated entries,
including locations for Google Earth.
• Technical Terms: 20 new entries.
• Bibliography: 20 new entries, many including links to PDFs; PDFs of
the introductions to SAA 16 and 18.

The 2010 update was funded by a grant from University College London's
Executive Sub-Committee on Innovations in Teaching Learning and
Assessment (ESCILTA). 

Knowledge and Power is a component of The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC)