Unraveling some Mysteries of Bahuri’s Correspondence. The Neo-Elamite Nineveh Letters Revised

Gorris, Elynn [UCL]

During the late 19th century, twenty-five Neo-Elamite cuneiform fragments were shipped from the archaeological site of Nineveh to the British Museum, London. In 1883, J.N. Strassmaier presented one of these fragments (K 1325) at the International Conference of Orientalists, held at Leiden. Since the publication of the twenty-five hand-copies of these tablets by F.H. Weissbach (1902), not only their content and dating remains a much debated subject, but also their Nineveh provenance gives rise to discussion. Were the Elamite letters part of the Assyrian state archive or were they private correspondence of Bahuri? Do the letters concern state matters or rather private affairs? In this paper, I will concentrate on these questions to discuss the political nature of these texts.