Cuneiform tablets from Bakr Awa

The archaeological site Bakr Awa is found in the autonomous region of Kurdistan in northeast Iraq between the modern cities of Sulaymaniyah and Halabja. The main mound rises up to 40 m above the Shahrizor plain in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. It is surrounded by an approx. 800 x 600 m large lower town. In the eastern part of the lower town, a large building from the Late Bronze Age was recovered during excavations by the Iraqi Antiquities Service. Within this building they found 24 clay tablets and fragments of clay tablets. Another 17 clay tablets were found by an excavation team from Heidelberg under the direction of Prof. Dr. Peter Miglus in 2013-14. These tablets were found in the rubble that was probably relocated during construction work on an Islamic building (ca. 12th-13th c. AD). It is possible that all tablet finds originally came from the same archive due to textual contexts. They have tentatively been dated based on palaeography and C14 dating to the 15th c. BC.

The texts found include administrative documents, sealed clay bullae, a list of witnesses - probably part of a legal document -, a letter, a hemerology (Matouš 1961, Sumer 17, 17-66), extispicy omens and prayers, as well as a fragment of the so-called Weidner God-list, which exhibits decidedly older archaic cuneiform signs.

Numerous smaller villages are mentioned in several of the administrative documents. They were under the supervision of administration officials and responsible for the cultivation of fields in the area around Bakr Awa and the supply of grain to the city. The household in which these documents orginate was evidently a larger scale administrative unit, possibly a ruler's residence. This possibility is also supported by the hemerology and extispicy texts. They contain knowledge of rulership that is regularly found in palace, temple, or scholarly libraries. The extispicy texts are particularly interesting because they offer new sources on extispicy performed on birds, which is seldom attested in Mesopotamia.

Another group of fragments deserves special attention, as they contain texts in the Hurrian language. Due to the current states of source material and research on Hurrian, their content is still beyond our understanding. Their structure, however, suggests a literary content, showing rhetorical features such as repetitions and chiasmi. Prof. Dr. Gernot Wilhelm (University of Würzburg) is significantly involved in editing these Hurrian texts.

The aim of the project is the edition and analysis of the content of all the text material found in Bakr Awa. The textual material already shows that Bakr Awa was under the influence of the Hurrian Empire of Mittani. However, the structure of the legal documents also shows clear parallels to texts found in Assur and Dur-Katlimmu. Language, script, and fragments of literary texts all show Babylonian influence. Thus, the written material from Bakr Awa exhibits a mixture of different influences, which takes into account the site's location between the great empires of Babylonia and Mittani as well as Assyria that emerged later in northern Mesopotamia.