The first published Old Babylonian archival text was BM 33191. Though published in 1882, 25 years after Akkadian was deemed to be a deciphered language, the tablet had been excavated in 1854. It took 100 years for someone to figure out where this tablet came from. Lo and behold, it came from Ur.
In the 1850s, Sir William Kennett Loftus surveyed Mesopotamia. At the request of Sir Henry Rawlinson, he was asked in 1854 to excavate Tell Muqayyar, already considered to be ancient Ur. Because Loftus was busy with other sites like Warka, ancient Uruk, he let J.E. Taylor do the work.
Both men sent material back to England that became mixed up when looked over by Rawlinson. Published by Johann Strassmaier in 1882, this text and others were considered to be from Warka. Republished by Charles-François Jean 49 years later, they were thought to come from Tell Sifr, ancient Kutalla.
Since Jean's work in 1931, BM 33191 went by the name Tell Sifr 1, the first of several tablets associated with Tell Sifr. Even though some preliminary work took place at Ur before Woolley, it wasn't much. This means that there wasn’t much to check if Tell Sifr was right.
Since Woolley’s excavations, concerns grew. The Tell Sifr tablets featured names familiar to texts found at Ur, and the form of the texts matched Taylor’s description at Muqayyar, not what Loftus found at Sifr. Thus, Dominique Charpin realized that BM 33191 and others came from Ur, not Kutalla.
So, what is BM 33191 about? It’s a court trial. A father and son go to the king to say that they did not receive money from the sale of their house to someone named Sâsum. Witnesses present at the time of sale corroborated that money in fact was exchanged. Two witnesses even swore at the Dublamah.
The É-Dublamah, or Great Tribunal House, was the major courthouse at Ur and is touched on in this post (see more here).
For scholars like Dominique Charpin, it is interesting that eight years had passed – if this was early in Nūr-Adad’s reign, “unscrupulous individuals may have tried to obtain favorable judgments despite their obvious bad faith.” A great question is if this sort of thing was common. I don't know!
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