“A LU E School Tablet from the Service Quarter of the Royal Palace AP at Urkesh,”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 55, pp. 45-48.
A tablet (labelled as A1j1) found in 1992 campaign at Urkesh is the topic of this paper.
A first fragment (A1.69) comes from the floor accumulation A1f113 in Room B2 of the royal palace AP at Urkesh; it joins with two other fragments discovered nearby which received the single number A1.72.
The preserved text consists of five lines on the obverse and just one line on the reverse: the text is an excerpt from the Early Dynastic LU E profession list, with other parallels from Abu Salabikh, Ebla, Gasur and Kish.
The discovery of this tablet hints to a possible interpretation of sector B as a storehouse and of sectors A and C as scribal places.
The tablet, dating for stratigraphic reasons to the reign of Tupkish, represents indeed the northernmost attestation of this kind of school texts, produced in a region belonging to a clear Hurrian horizon. [cf. Urkesh Website on page Texts].
[M. De Pietri – November 2019]