El género epistolar en los archivos cuneiformes de nuzi (norte de irak, ss.Xv-xiv a.C.)formularios, usos e implicaciones históricas en la administración del reino

Zusammenfassung

This dissertation provides a detailed analysis of the preserved letters from the ancient city of Nuzi. The corpus consists of 95 clay tablets written in cuneiform script, dating back to the Late Bronze Age, that were found in the site of Yorghan Tepe, near the modern city of Kirkuk. Although Nuzi texts have been known to scholarship since the end of the 19th century and have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention, the corpus of letters has been somewhat neglected. A few letters have been transliterated and translated a number of times, but many of them have not been the subject of detailed treatment after publication of the copy. The attention that those documents have received so far is uneven. Today, the greatest lack is the absence of overall studies that address the epistolary documentation of the site as a particular genre and that focus on the specific nature of that type of documentation in that context. This dissertation applies the methodology commonly used in the fields of philology and ancient history, based on the work on ancient written sources. The starting point is always a thorough analysis of the original cuneiform text. That analysis consists of decoding the text following the usual steps: transliteration, translation, and comment. Based on knowledge of the text, the next step is to analyse the implications its content has at various levels: historical, prosopographic, typological, and philological. Those various levels of study, which combine an internal analysis of the corpus and a comparison with other Ancient Near Eastern archives, inform the various chapters of the dissertation. The contribution of this dissertation to the field is twofold: it provides a homogeneous edition of all the letters from Nuzi, and it offers a detailed study of those documents as a genre, thus filling the gap left by previous scholarship. Aiming at a holistic approach, it defines the main characteristics and use of letters in Nuzi through an analysis of content, typology, individuals involved, tablet format, orthography, language, and other topics. The main conclusions can be divided into two basic groups according to the topic they concern: social use, and language and text typology. The former defines the activities and the individuals to which letters were linked, as well as the ways in which individuals used that type of document. The latter analyse the language in which the letters were written, including the use of formulaic expressions and the specific wording of epistles. In addition, they define the letters of the corpus as a genre on the basis of empirical taxonomy.