requests and inquiries made of
the Sun-god oracle regarding the troubles and difficulties of the king and
royal family, domestic as well as public, in the reigns of Esarhaddon and
Ashurbanipal. The letters too, found in the same collection, are the
letters received by the king from his officers in all parts of his realm.
The lists are connected with expenses of his household. Such votive
tablets as are preserved are concerned with offerings of the royal family,
or such high officers as probably were permanent inmates of the palace. We
have, in fact, the contents of the muniment chests of the Sargonid kings
of Assyria. That the royal library was mixed up with these documents may
be due to the contents of an upper chamber falling, when its floor was
burnt out; but the mixing may have been done by the discoverers.

In a very real sense these come from a record office, but are confined to
royal rather than state documents; though a few duplicates of charters
occur. Hence we look in vain for many classes of documents, such as are
common in the archives of temples or private families. We have no marriage
settlements, no adoptions, no partnerships.

Can we believe that such transactions were less common in Nineveh than
fifteen centuries before in Sippara, or Larsa, or Babylon; or later in
Babylon, Sippara, or Nippur? There cannot be a shadow of doubt that such
documents exist in shoals somewhere in the ruins of Nineveh and will one
day be found. Hence we must regard it as extremely improbable that the
ordinary citizens of Nineveh contributed the records of their transactions
to the Kouyunjik Collections now in the British Museum. They either kept
them in their own houses or in some temple archives. As will be seen
later, a few have already been found; but it is extremely difficult to
locate them exactly. It is quite certain that a few of the tablets in the
British Museum were found at other localities, such as Sherif Khan, Ashur,
Kalah, Erech, Larsa, and Babylon.

For the most part these appear to have been placed in one collection by
the discoverers, and only internal evidence can now decide where they were
found. But the great bulk of the Kouyunjik Collections, as far as
contracts, legal documents, and kindred tablets are concerned, are the
result of explorations conducted on the site of the ancient Nineveh, by
Layard and Rassam. They probably came from palace archives, and as a
result possess a special character of their