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The present volume completes the critical edition of the political correspondence of Assurbanipal, the first part of which was published in SAA 21. The 163 letters edited here were sent from southern Mesopotamia and Elam, mostly by governors or other high-ranking local administrators and military commanders; almost all are addressed to the Assyrian king, although a few nonroyal letters are also included. As in SAA 21, the bulk of the correspondence dates from the civil war between Assurbanipal and Samas-sumu-ukin and provides dramatic eyewitness evidence of this turbulent time.The volume does not contain a single letter authored by Assurbanipal, but almost all the letters originate from recipients of the royal letters in SAA 21 and deal largely with the same political and military events as the corresponding royal letters. Altogether, these letters convey a multifaceted picture of the prolonged conflict, enabling a detailed reconstruction of its brutal course and consequences. As a firsthand account of a cruel war, this collection of letters is unique in Mesopotamia, with comparable sources known only from Greek and Roman times.

This study identifies and analyzes Aramaic loanwords occurring in Neo-Assyrian texts between 911 and 612 B.C. As two Semitic languages, Neo-Assyrian and Aramaic are sibling-descendants of a postulated common ancestor, Proto-Semitic. The work provides information about the contact between the two languages and about the people who spoke them. To achieve this scholarly objective, a total of 9,057 Neo-Assyrian texts of different genres were utilized. The study discusses 166 proposed Aramaic loanwords in Neo-Assyrian, which are evaluated according to phonological, morphological, and semantic criteria. The findings demonstrate that only 69 words are confirmed loanwords, and 50 are possible loanwords. Additionally, 47 words are rejected as possible Aramaic loanwords in Neo-Assyrian. The majority of the confirmed loanwords are attested in letters and legal and administrative documents from the seventh century B.C., stemming from the major Assyrian cities of Nineveh, Assur, and Calah. Most of the confirmed loanwords are nouns. Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the mid-eighth century B.C. onwards, and the loanwords analyzed provide evidence for the use of Aramaic in Assyria proper as well. The relatively small number of certain and possible loanwords, however, fails to support the impression that Aramaic was widespread as a vernacular language in Assyria proper, especially towards the end of the period studied. The evidence also corroborates the conclusion, based on the extant prosopographical data, that the predominantly Assyrian character was maintained in Assyria proper until the very end of the Assyrian Empire.

Egypt and Mesopotamia, two cradles of civilization, repeatedly came into contact with each other in antiquity. Interaction between Africa and Mesopotamia was particularly close and frequent in the period when the Neo-Assyrian Empire controlled Egypt (dominated by rulers of Libyan descent) and confronted the kings of Kush (from present-day Sudan). This book seeks to identify Africans--namely, Egyptians, Kushites, and Libyans--in Neo-Assyrian texts from this period, discussing the presence of Africans in the Neo-Assyrian Empire at both individual/biographic and collective/demographic levels and exploring such concepts as ethnicity, multiculturalism, integration, and assimilation.