“Un document de foundation Hurrite,”
RA 42.1/2, pp. 1-20.
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Parrot and Nougayrol deal respectively with the presentation of two correlated artefacts kept at the Louvre Museum: AO 19937 and AO 19938; the former is the lion-shaped broze peg keeping the latter, the white-stone tablet inscribed with a Hurrian text concerning the dedication of a temple to the god dPIRI.GAL (described by Nougayrol, on p. 14, as “la grande lionne”) by the king of Urkesh Tiš-atal (the name is read as Tišari in this paper).
The two objects were purchased in 1948 on the antiquity market by the Louvre Museum, helped by the ‘Société des Amis du Louvre’; the provenance of the objects was undefined, but both the text and the lion stand for an origin from Urkesh.
In the first part of the paper (pp. 1-2), Parrot describes in detail the bronze lion, stressing how the nail-statuette and the tablet must be contemporaneous (because of some traces of metal, like a contra-imprint, can be recognized on the tablet) and suggests a dating to the end of the Sargonic period and a provenance from the Upper Tigris or Khabur, because of the strong Hurrian features of the piece.
In the second part of the contribution (pp. 3-20), Nougayrol offers a palaeographical and philological analysis of the inscription on the stone tablet, dating it to the 24th-23rd cent. BC and suggesting (because of some peculiar sign shapes) that the text was dictated by a Hurrian person but written down by a scribe of Akkadian origin (on a first version later re-written on the stone-tablet by a Hurrian scribe).
Nougayrol also offers a wide comment on the text itself (dealing with palaeographical, morphological and lexical features), followed by some reflections on the divinities quoted in the dedication inscription, retracing the composition of the pantheon at Urkesh.
The very last conclusions also deal with the actual location of Urkesh, at that time not yet discovered by the archaeologist: the author reminds how Thureau-Dangin (RA 9, pp. 1ff.) has suggested a place at the east of the Tigris and he himself advances a further specification: “En l’absence de toute indication contraire, n’est-il pas plus vraisemblable de situer Urkeš dans le rayon « normal » de leur [note mDP: i.e., Mari and Chagar Bazar] économie, c’est-à-dire : le « triangle » du Ḫabur ou uses environs ?”.
A latest remark is displayed about the topic ‘Hurrian and Subartu’: “Subartu - ou « subaréen » - exprime essentiellement un concept géographique, d’extension variable suivant les époques et les points d’observation, un contenant, et « Hurrite », une entité linguistique ou ethnique un contenu” (p. 20).