The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon

Abstract

The sixth (1955) season of excavation by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq at Nimrud (ancient Kalḫu, Biblical Calah) was mainly devoted to clearing buildings in the south-eastern corner of the akropolis. One building to the north of Ezida, the temple of Nabu, contained a long Throne-room (SEB 2) where lay a varied collection of ivories and bronzes from Assyrian furniture broken when the building was destroyed by fire. Amid this debris more than three hundred and fifty fragments of baked clay tablets were found scattered in the north-west corner of the room between the dais which once supported the royal throne and the door leading to a small ante-chamber (NTS 3). Some fragments were also found in the southern doorway of the Throne-room and in the adjacent courtyard (Fig. 1). It will probably never be known with certainty, whether the documents had once been housed in this room or thrown there when the building was sacked by the Medes about 612 B.C. A special room (NT12) in the neighbouring Nabu Sanctuary seems to have been set aside for the use of scribes and for the storage of tablets and this may have been their original location. These fragments proved to be parts of a few large tablets of which one was reconstituted in the field. Miss Barbara Parker, who was present at the time of discovery, soon identified the text as a treaty made in 672 B.C. by Esarhaddon, king of Assyria (681–669 B.C.), with a chieftain of the Medes named Ramataia of Urukazaba(r)na. The remaining texts were duplicates except that they named different city-govenors, or chieftains, as the other party to the agreement. The dated fragments bear the same Eponym year-date of 672 B.C. With commendable speed Miss Parker published a brief report based on her preliminary reading of about three hundred lines of the Ramataia text and some of the fragments.