Numerous textual sources relating to Ashurbanipal fall outside the scope of this volume. In particular, the numerous Ashurbanipal colophons, [8] which one could classify as a type of royal inscription, and the texts assigned to the reign of Ashurbanipal and his successors that are edited in the SAA series are excluded from RINAP 5, as already mentioned in the introduction of Part 2.[9] There are numerous texts that were catalogued, copied, edited, referred to, or transliterated in Bauer, Asb. and Borger, BIWA that the authors decided not to include in Part 3, thereby excluding them entirely from RINAP 5. In the case of some of the texts, the decision was fairly easy and straightforward, whereas in the case of others, it was not since it was difficult to determine whether the text should be regarded as a royal inscription (in the strictest sense; for example, an annalistic text or a summary inscription in the style of the inscriptions written on clay prisms or a dedicatory inscription) or as a historical-literary composition (for example, the Ashurbanipal Epic or the Epical Narrative Relating to Ashurbanipal's Elamite Wars).[10] Texts that were regarded as royal inscriptions, but whose attribution to Ashurbanipal is (highly) uncertain, are sometimes edited as 1000-numbers in this volume and sometimes excluded from RINAP 5 altogether, depending on those texts' current states of preservation. Texts that the authors considered to be historical-literary compositions are also not included in RINAP 5; the majority of these were edited or catalogued in Bauer, Asb. pp. 71–82.[11] As it is not yet possible to categorize the genre and assign a royal 'author' of each and every one of these fragments with a high degree of confidence, it is inevitable that not every previously published Ashurbanipal royal inscription has made it into RINAP 5. Therefore, it is very likely that the authors of the present volume excluded some texts that should have been included in Part 3, even as a 1000-number. Given the poor state of preservation of some of the texts, this was unavoidable. Through new joins and new pieces, hopefully some of the issues the present authors faced in the preparation of this volume will be eventually resolved.
YBC 2171 (Stephens, YOS 9 no. 80), an Assyrian inscription written on a clay cylinder that A.K. Grayson attributed to Sîn-šarra-iškun, is not included with the inscriptions of that Assyrian ruler since the present authors see no conclusive proof that that text was composed while Sîn-šarra-iškun was king of Assyria. [12] As already proposed by R. Borger and J.A. Brinkman, that inscription likely dates to the time of the much earlier Assyrian king Ninurta-tukultī-Aššur and, thus, is not edited in RINAP 5/3.[13]
Moreover, there are numerous still-to-be-published and still-to-be-attributed Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions whose royal 'authors' are yet to be positively identified. The bulk of these badly-damaged texts are in the DT, K, Rm, and Sm collections of the British Museum (London). Although many of these texts have been transliterated since the 1980s by G. Frame, A.K. Grayson, E. Leichty, and other scholars associated directly or indirectly with the RIM and RINAP projects, this large group of Assyrian 'historical' texts are not edited in RINAP 5/3, despite it being the last volume of inscriptions to appear in the RIMA and RINAP series. Instead, these poorly-preserved sources will first be disseminated online, in an open-access format and, thus, the work of these scholars will be made accessible via CDLI, eBL, and Oracc, principally through RIAo and RINAPo. [14]
[8] This rich source material, however, will be soon be edited as part of the Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal Project, a collaborative, online project between the British Museum and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München directed by Enrique Jiménez and Jonathan Taylor.
[9] See Jeffers and Novotny, RINAP 5/2 p. 3 for further details.
[10] See, for example, Livingstone, SAA 3 pp. 48–52 nos. 19–22.
[11] Most of these texts will eventually be included in the fragmentarium of Enrique Jiménez' Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) Project (https://www.ebl.lmu.de/ [last accessed January 25, 2023]).
[12] Grayson, Studies Winnett p. 168; and Grayson, ARI 1 p. 143 §933. The object is often referred to as a "prism" in earlier literature.
[13] Borger, EAK 1 pp. 100–102; and Brinkman, PKB p. 102 n. 557.
[14] Respectively https://cdli.ucla.edu, https://www.ebl.lmu.de/, http://oracc.org/riao/, and http://oracc.org/rinap/.
Jamie Novotny
Jamie Novotny, 'Texts Excluded from RINAP 5/3', RINAP 5: The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Aššur-etel-ilāni, and Sîn-šarra-iškun, The RINAP/RINAP 5 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2023 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap5/RINAP53Introduction/TextsExcludedfromPart3/]