Unravelling an Ancient Near Eastern archival mystery: The provenance of the Elamite Nineveh Letters revised

Over the last century, scholars have intensively discussed the provenance of the Elamite Nineveh Letters. According to the inventory numbers of the British Museum, this archive of twenty-three late Elamite cuneiform tablets was allegedly excavated between 1850-1891 in the Neo-Assyrian capital Nineveh (Iraq). As these letters are the only Elamite tablets in the so-called Library of Assurbanipal, their Nineveh provenance was already questioned as early as the late 19th century (Sayce 1885: 756). Eager to solve this archival mystery, some scholars suggested that the letters ended up in the (K)uyunjik-collection by a 19th century mix-up of transport cases in either Bagdad before shipment to London or during the registration in the British Museum (Reade 1986: 213); some attribute a Malamir (Iran) provenance to the tablets (Charpin 1988), brought to Nineveh by British diplomats-explorers (Vallat 1988; 1998); others browsed the old Nineveh excavation reports, trying to reconstruct meticulously the archaeological context of the Elamite Nineveh Letters (Reade 1992). Due to the lack of an academic text edition and a proper grammatical analysis of the Elamite Nineveh Letters, none of the above hypotheses takes into account the possibility that they might have been added in antiquity to the Library of Assurbanipal as e.g. war booty, or physical evidence of international communication. Recent studies (Gorris 2018) on Elamite writing traditions and the linguistic particularities of the Elamite Nineveh Letters have revealed the geographical scope and timeframe in which these tablets were written. This improved understanding of the Elamite Nineveh Letters combined with a study of the Elamite and Assyrian archival methods might bring us a step closer to unravel one of the Ancient Near Eastern archival mysteries. With a historical-linguistic approach, this paper aims to re-evaluate the plausibility of the already existing hypotheses, but will equally explore the options for a historical explanation in order to retrace the provenance of the Elamite Nineveh Letters