The city of Kalhu (modern Nimrud) became the capital of the Assyrian Empire under Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 bc) and, while it lost this status during the reign of Sargon II (r. 721–705 bc), it remained an important settlement until the empire's collapse at the end of the seventh century bc. The city has been one of the most significant sources of Neo-Assyrian administrative and legal documents for modern scholars, providing texts of vital importance to the reconstruction of the world of the Assyrian Empire and the lives of those who inhabited it. The material found at Kalhu is particularly elucidating because, unlike other sites, Kalhu has yielded Neo-Assyrian texts of these genres from a broad temporal spectrum. This includes seventh-century material, which is common at other locations as well, but also documents from the ninth and eighth centuries bc. Many of these earlier texts, as well as some of the later ones, have long been available in modern editions in other volumes of the Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud (CTN) series, as well as the monograph Edubba 10 (A.Y. Ahmad and J.N. Postgate, Archives from the Domestic Wing of the North-West Palace at Kalhu/Nimrud. Edubba 10. (London, 2007)).

This sixth and penultimate instalment in the CTN series provides editions and commentary for 118 predominantly administrative and legal documents found at three sites: the Nabu Temple (Part I, nos 1–59), the “Town Wall Houses” (Part II, nos 60–115), and the “Town Wall Palace” (Part III, nos 116–18). These texts date mainly to the mid-seventh century bc, with some dating to the late eighth and early seventh centuries. As such, they provide insights about the locations from which they originate, while also increasing the availability of later material from Kalhu, which will facilitate comparison with evidence from other sites. The majority of the texts edited in the volume were excavated in the years 1952, 1953, and 1956. The 1953 tablets were catalogued and partly edited by D.J. Wiseman in Iraq 15, while B. Parker edited the 1956 documents in Iraq 19 (p. 1). The significant amount of time that has elapsed, advances in the field, and the inclusion here of several previously entirely unpublished texts, render this volume very welcome.

The monograph's introductory matter is fairly brief (pp. 1–3). The detailed introductions to the various sections of the volume compensate for this, however, and the 14 tables provide useful information on such matters as the date and provenance of the texts, as well as involved parties and interest rates in the legal transactions. Suzanne Herbordt's analysis of the seal impressions on the tablets (pp. 5–14), as well as the inclusion of images of these impressions throughout the volume, constitute another of its strengths.

The volume is separated into its three main parts according to provenance, but ordered within these parts by textual genre. The editions themselves are of high quality, with detailed notes and commentary providing philological information and additional context.

Part I (pp. 15–117) contains a total of 59 texts from the Nabu Temple, consisting of one letter, 48 legal documents, and ten administrative tablets. Very little evidence on the inner workings of temple administration survives for the Neo-Assyrian period, in spite of the great social and economic importance of temples at the time. It is therefore particularly gratifying to have these texts assembled here. Forty triangular loan dockets form the bulk of Part I. Nineteen of these dockets were not mentioned in Parker's Iraq 19 article and are thus published for the first time in this volume. The loan dockets date for the most part from 672–652 bc, in particular the years 662–660. Indeed, sixteen of the dockets were drawn up in the same month, Addaru (XII, February–March) of 661 bc (p. 38). That the dockets come from a common location and timespan allows for various interesting avenues of analysis here, on subjects such as the borrowers themselves (pp. 40–43), as well as the terms of the loans (pp. 43–5).

Part II (pp. 131–255) contains editions of 56 tablets from the “Town Wall Houses”. The majority of the documents are either conveyances (16 texts) or loans and debt-notes (32 texts). Within these categories, the documents are ordered chronologically. Despite this, 47 of the documents were found in one location, TW53 Room 19, and “plainly constitute an archive of a man named Šamaš-šarru-uṣur”, while the other texts “presumably belong to separate households” (p. 131). By not ordering these documents by provenance, therefore, the authors slightly de-emphasize this archive in favour of highlighting genre and date.

Part III (pp. 256–8) contains just three texts, a letter (no. 116), a note of textiles (no. 117) and a hemerology (no. 118). They were all found in Room 1 of the “Town Wall Palace”. The section's introduction argues against interpreting the presence of a hemerology in this room as evidence that it was a library, as hemerologies were not literary but rather “strictly utilitarian” (p. 256).

The indices (pp. 269–86) cover personal names, “professions, etc.” and toponyms. Lists of logograms and Akkadian terms would perhaps also have been useful. The first six plates (Pl. I–VI) are dedicated to seal impressions, while the remainder are copies (Pl. 1–44). As they were prepared by many different hands, these copies are something of a “mixed bunch” (p. vii) stylistically, but this does not detract from their utility. In summation, this volume will prove invaluable to anyone interested in the legal and administrative evidence from the Neo-Assyrian period.

All of the texts are now also available as annotated, fully searchable open access editions in the digital Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire text corpus (oracc.org/atae/ctn6/).