‘Weaving Together Loose Threads’ On the Serialisation of the Therapeutic Corpus at Nineveh

This article provides an overview of the development of the therapeutic text corpus in the Assurbanipal Library. It explores the editorial steps taken to produce new standard editions of the therapeutic texts for the Library through a systematic investigation of the layout and format of tablets with pharmaceutical remedies as well as the colophon types used in the corpus. To facilitate the study of the available source material, the texts are divided into four groups. The classification is based on ductus and the different colophons used in the Assurbanipal Library, yielding four groups: the ‘Babylonian group’, ‘mixed group’, ‘q-group’, and ‘dedicatory group’. As argued here, the tablets in these four groups represent different stages of the editing process.