The Process of Producing the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud/Kalḫu

Abstract

The thousands of royal inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian (934-612 BCE) kings have been studied by Assyriologists for the past one hundred fifty years, but much about how they were produced remains unknown. A relatively unexamined body of evidence, namely, textual variation between the manuscripts of individual compositions, provides new insights into the production of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. However, the study of textual variation in these manuscripts has previously been hampered by inadequate publication of the manuscripts, preventing analysis of such levels of textuality as format and script density, as well as paleographic, orthographic, grammatical, and lexical variants. With the help of the technological developments of the past two decades, especially the application of digital humanities to this corpus of texts, as well as through first-hand examination of manuscripts and better publication of them, it is now possible to investigate this aspect of the corpus of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions, with a view to clarifying the scribal processes which produced them. This dissertation examines textual variation in manuscripts of a single composition, the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II from Nimrud (ancient Kalḫu), as well as evidence from other cuneiform documents as necessary, in order to reconstruct the process of producing the Standard Inscription. Two hundred thirty-one manuscripts of the Standard Inscription were transliterated and such information as their variants and formats were analyzed and cataloged, and patterns of shared variants were noted. In addition to these data, references to the production of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions in Neo-Assyrian letters, as well as likely examples of drafts and master copies of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions, were brought to bear. On the basis of these data, this dissertation argues that the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II from Nimrud was produced in three stages. First, a master copy was created,