Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Chapter One. Text and Archaeology: Practitioners and Practice, Diviners and Divination -- Chapter Two. Emar on the Euphrates: Archaeology, History, and Society -- Chapter Three. ‘Temple’ M1: Morphology of a Tablet Collection -- Chapter Four. Interpreting the ‘Temple’ M1 Tablet Collection -- Chapter Five. Conclusion -- Key to the Appendices -- Appendix A. Excavated Tablets and Fragments by Find-spot -- Appendix B. Excavated Tablets and Fragments by Genre -- Appendix C. Colophons -- Appendix D. Summary of Epigraphic Data from Emar and ‘Temple’ M1 -- Bibliography -- Emar Fragments: New Identifications -- Concordance and Index of Excavated Emar Texts by Publication Number -- Objects Excavated in Emar -- Looted Tablets from Emar and the Middle Euphrates -- Concordance and Index of Excavated Emar Texts by Excavation Number -- Miscellaneous Ancient Texts Discussed -- Words Discussed -- Proper Nouns Discussed -- Subjects.

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In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.

Description based on print version record.