Textual History of the Bilingual Legal Phrasebook ki-ulutin-bi-šè | ana ittīšu | in time

2023–2025

RFH04

Top view of a 7th century BCE manuscript of ki-ulutin-bi-šè with its colophon (K 4350, © The Trustees of the British Museum)

The vast majority of cuneiform manuscripts consist of administrative documents. Direct links between this significant corpus and scholarly compositions are rare, and therefore the legal phrasebook named ki-ulutin-bi-šè ‘in time’ after its first entry is a remarkable exception. Neo-Assyrian witnesses of the phrasebook from the 7th century BCE preserve Sumerian legal terms and phrases attested in documents from the early Old-Babylonian period, more than one millennium earlier. In its standardised bilingual version, the series ki-ulutin-bi-šè | ana ittīšu consists of seven tablets with roughly 1500 entries accompanied by an Akkadian translation. The later Assyrian manuscripts found in Northern Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq) attest to a knowledge transfer from Babylonian scribal centres in the south. Old-Babylonian school tablets preserve excerpts from one or more earlier monolingual versions.

This project aims to provide a new critical edition of the bilingual legal phrasebook together with its monolingual forerunners. The textual history of the composition is mapped with regard to shifts in content, genre, format, script, language, and archival context. Following an analysis of the connections between the lexical and the documentary material, it consideres why the series proved worth for preservation and transmission long after the decline of the Sumerian legal tradition.

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Project lead: Sören Krömer