The Nuzi texts are ancient documents found during an excavation of

Nuzi Nuzi (Hurrian Nuzi/Nuzu; Akkadian Gasur) at modern Yorghan Tepe (also Yorgan Tepa and Jorgan Tepe), Iraq was an ancient Mesopotamian city 12 kilometers southwest of the city of Arrapha (modern Kirkuk) and 70 kilometers southwest of Sātu Qala, ...

, an ancient

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

n city southwest of

Kirkuk Kirkuk (; ; ; ) is a major city in northern Iraq, serving as the capital of the Kirkuk Governorate. The city is home to a diverse population of Kurds, Iraqi Turkmen, Iraqi Turkmens and Arabs. Kirkuk sits on the ruins of the original Kirkuk Cit ...

in modern

Kirkuk Governorate Kirkuk Governorate (; ; ) or Kirkuk Province is a governorate in northern Iraq. The governorate has an area of . In 2017, the estimated population was 1,259,561 people. The provincial capital is the city of Kirkuk. It is divided into four Distri ...

Iraq Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...

, located near the

Tigris The Tigris ( ; see #Etymology, below) is the eastern of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia, the other being the Euphrates. The river flows south from the mountains of the Armenian Highlands through the Syrian Desert, Syrian and Arabia ...

river. They were found on

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

tablets written in the

Akkadian language Akkadian ( ; )John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages''. Ed. Roger D. Woodard (2004, Cambridge) Pages 218–280 was an East Semitic language that is attested ...

. The site consists of one medium-sized multiperiod tell and two small single period mounds. The texts are mainly legal and business documents. They have previously been viewed as evidence for the age and veracity of certain parts of the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

, especially of the

Patriarchal age The patriarchal age is the era of the three biblical patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, according to the narratives of Genesis 12–50 (these chapters also contain the history of Joseph, although Joseph is not one of the patriarchs). It is prec ...

, but that attribution is now doubted by most scholars.

Archeological site and tablets

Tablets from the site began appearing as early as 1896, but the first serious archaeological efforts only began in 1925 after

Gertrude Bell Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly inf ...

noticed tablets appearing in the markets of Baghdad. The dig was mainly worked by

Edward Chiera Edward Chiera (August 5, 1885 – June 20, 1933) was an Italian- American archaeologist, Assyriologist, and scholar of religions and linguistics. Born in Rome, Italy, in 1885, Chiera trained as a theologian at the Crozer Theological Seminary (B ...

, Robert Pfeiffer, and Richard Starr under the auspices of the

Iraq Museum The Iraq Museum () is the national museum of Iraq, located in Baghdad. It is sometimes informally called the National Museum of Iraq. The Iraq Museum contains precious relics from the Mesopotamian, Abbasid, and Persian civilizations. It was loo ...

and the Baghdad School of the

American Schools of Oriental Research The American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), founded in 1900 as the American School of Oriental Study and Research in Palestine, is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, which supports the research and teaching of ...

and later the

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

and

Fogg Art Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

. Excavations continued through 1931. The site has 15 occupation levels. The hundreds of tablets and other finds recovered were published in a series of volumes. More finds continue to be published to this day. To date, around 5000 tablets are known, mostly held at the Oriental Institute, the

Harvard Semitic Museum The Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE, previously the Harvard Semitic Museum) is a museum founded in 1889. It moved into its present location at 6 Divinity Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1903. History Architectural firm A. ...

and the Iraq Museum in

Baghdad Baghdad ( or ; , ) is the capital and List of largest cities of Iraq, largest city of Iraq, located along the Tigris in the central part of the country. With a population exceeding 7 million, it ranks among the List of largest cities in the A ...

. Many are routine legal and business documents and about one quarter concern the business transactions of a single family.The Teip-tilla Family of Nuzi: A Genealogical Reconstruction, Maynard Paul Maidman, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1976 The vast majority of finds are from the

Hurrian The Hurrians (; ; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri) were a people who inhabited the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. They spoke the Hurro-Urartian language, Hurrian language, and lived throughout northern Syria (region) ...

period during the second millennium BC with the remainder dating back to the town's founding during the

Akkadian Empire The Akkadian Empire () was the first known empire, succeeding the long-lived city-states of Sumer. Centered on the city of Akkad (city), Akkad ( or ) and its surrounding region, the empire united Akkadian language, Akkadian and Sumerian languag ...

. An archive contemporary to the Hurrian archive at Nuzi has been excavated from the "Green Palace" at the site of Tell al-Fakhar, southwest of Nuzi. These tablets have been described as showing parallels between the Bible and Hurrian culture such as making a slave an heir and using a surrogate for a barren wife. Writing in ''The Oxford History of the Biblical World'' Wayne T. Pitard says "The appearance of Late Bronze Age parallels to certain marriage, inheritance, and family religious customs in Genesis cannot be used as evidence that such stories preserve ancient traditions of the second millennium, since most of these customs continued into the first millennium BCE when the Genesis narratives were written down. So the Nuzi texts have a limited, largely illustrative function."

Notes and references

Bibliography

* Nuzi Texts and Their Uses as Historical Evidence - By Maynard Paul Maidman - * A History of Israel - By John Bright - {{ISBN, 9780664220686 Manuscripts Mesopotamian literature Book of Genesis

Archeological site and tablets

See also

Notes and references

Bibliography