Numerous textual sources relating to Ashurbanipal fall outside the scope of this volume. As mentioned above, inscriptions discovered in Babylonia will now be edited in Part 3,[10] together with the texts of uncertain attribution (the 1000-number texts, as defined in the Editorial Notes), and the texts of some members of Ashurbanipal's family — his wife Libbāli-šarrat, as well as his sons and successors Aššur-etel-ilāni and Sîn-šarra-iškun[11] and loyal officials (namely Sîn-balāssu-iqbi, governor of Ur).[12]
There are numerous texts that were catalogued, copied, edited, referred to, or transliterated in Bauer, Asb. and Borger, BIWA that the authors, in consultation with the series editor-in-chief Grant Frame, decided (1) not to include in Part 2, (2) to edit as a 1000-number (to be included in Part 3), or (3) to exclude 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").[13] Texts that were regarded as royal inscriptions, but whose attribution to Ashurbanipal was not entirely certain (due to their fragmentary state of preservation, their subject matter, and/or names and words preserved in them), will generally be edited as 1000-numbers in Part 3. Texts that were considered to be historical-literary compositions have been excluded from RINAP 5 altogether. The bulk of the excluded Ashurbanipal inscriptions were texts edited or catalogued in Bauer, Asb. pp. 71–82, in particular since most of these were deemed more historical-literary texts than royal inscriptions.[14] 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 certainty, it is inevitable that not every previously published Ashurbanipal royal inscription has made it into Part 2. Therefore, it is very likely that the authors of the present volume excluded some texts that should have been included in RINAP 5/2. Given the poor state of preservation of some of the texts, this was unavoidable. Hopefully, new joins and new pieces (some of which might have been wrongly classified as a different genre, for example, literary) will resolve some of the issues the present authors faced in the preparation of this volume. As this work has built upon the scholarly publications of T. Bauer and R. Borger, the authors hope that future generations of Assyriologists will build upon the work presented here, making new discoveries and improving the known Ashurbanipal corpus. Thus, RINAP 5/2 should be regarded as a 2022 snapshot of the inscriptions of the certainly-attributed inscriptions of Assyria's last great king written on clay tablets.
The numerous Ashurbanipal colophons, which one could classify as a type of royal inscription, are excluded from RINAP 5. These short texts — which were last edited as a group in 1968, in Hunger, Kolophone (pp. 97–107 nos. 317–342) — were never intended to be edited with the rest of the inscriptions of Assyria's last great king, even when these texts were to appear as part of the now-defunct RIMA series, as RIMA 8.[15] This rich source material, however, will be soon 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.
Lastly, any text assigned to the reign of Ashurbanipal that is written on a clay tablet and edited in the SAA series is excluded here, including K 2564, a dedicatory text recording the recovery of a village for the moon-god Sîn (Kataja and Whiting, SAA 12 pp. 110–112 no. 90).
[10] For most of these texts, see Frame, RIMB 2 pp. 194–230 B.6.32.1–23. Annotated, open-access editions of Ashurbanipal's Babylonian inscriptions are already accessible at oracc.org/rinap/rinap5/pager, as well as at oracc.org/ribo/babylon6/pager.
[11] The inscriptions of Ashurbanipal's older brother Šamaš-šuma-ukīn will not be edited in RINAP 5. For editions of the inscriptions of that king of Babylon, see Frame, RIMB 2 pp. 248–259 B.6.33.1–2001. Annotated, open-access editions of the inscriptions of Aššur-etel-ilāni and Sîn-šarra-iškun are already accessible at oracc.org/rinap/rinap5/pager.
[12] These texts are edited in Frame, RIMB 2 pp. 230–247 B.6.32.2001–2016. Editions of the texts are also available via the URL provided in the preceding note, as well as at oracc.org/ribo/babylon6/pager.
[13] See, for example, Livingstone, SAA 3 pp. 48–52 nos. 19–22.
[14] Most of these texts will be eventually included in the fragmentarium of Enrique Jiménez' Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) Project (https://www.ebl.lmu.de/ [last accessed April 11, 2022]).
[15] On RIMA 8, see Novotny and Jeffers, RINAP 5/1 pp. xvii–xviii.
Jamie Novotny
Jamie Novotny, 'Texts Excluded from RINAP 5/2', RINAP 5: The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Aššur-etel-ilāni, and Sîn-šarra-iškun, The RINAP/RINAP 5 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2022 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap5/rinap52introduction/textsexcludedfrompart2/]