Ashurbanipal had numerous epigraphs inscribed on the walls of his North Palace and on the walls of at least one room (Room XXXIII) of Sennacherib's South-West Palace that he renovated at Nineveh as part of his relief programs in these structures, but due to the state of preservation of these buildings or (in the case of the former) the limited scope of the excavations, only thirty-five complete or partial epigraphs are known at this point from the actual reliefs (text nos. 24–58). However, in addition to these, collections of Ashurbanipal's epigraphs were also written upon clay tablets, and they contain many more epigraphs than have been found on palace walls, demonstrating the extensive nature of the epigraphs that were likely included — and are no longer preserved or are as yet to be unearthed — or at least considered for inclusion in those relief depictions. The exact relationship between the epigraphs on palace walls and those on tablets is not entirely clear. While it is possible that some of the tablets could have been created by copying the epigraphs directly from the relief depictions themselves, it appears that most of the tablets were crafted as drafts or used as a guide or outline in various stages of planning the relief programs. Subscripts that appear on a few of the tablets (text nos. 172–173, 178, and 180) make reference to the fact that their respective epigraphs were (or were to be) written upon the walls of the palace, while the subscript of one tablet (text no. 161) makes the general statement that its epigraphs were read before the king, most likely as part of his review and ultimate approval of their contents. For discussions on the relationship between the epigraphs accompanying wall reliefs in the Nineveh palaces and the epigraphs recorded on Ashurbanipal's clay tablets, see Reade, Design and Decoration pp. 326–334; Gerardi, Ashurbanipal's Elamite Campaigns pp. 96–99; Kaelin, Bildexperiment pp. 9–78 and 93–114; and J.M. Russell, Writing on the Wall pp. 156–209. The epigraphs that appear on tablets are generally placed into two separate groupings based on their contents, which scholars have designated as the "Teumman and Dunānu cycle" (text nos. 161–171) and the "Šamaš-šuma-ukīn and Tammarītu cycle" (text nos. 172–183). However, within these collections, no single tablet contains all of the epigraphs that appear within that group and the epigraphs are often arranged in a different order from tablet to tablet. Moreover, the format of the tablets is not uniform as these collections of epigraphs are written on either one- or two-column tablets. Thus, it should be emphasized that the tablet fragments that do not preserve both a left and right edge could — and probably in most cases do — belong to two-column tablets rather than single-column ones.
Click on the links in this paragraph or in the main menu to read more about these texts, especially the clay tablets with the "Teumman and Dunānu cycle" of epigraphs (text nos. 161–171) and the "Šamaš-šuma-ukīn and Tammarītu cycle" of epigraphs (text nos. 172–183).
Joshua Jeffers & Jamie Novotny
Joshua Jeffers & Jamie Novotny, 'Epigraphs on Tablets (text nos. 161-184)', 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/rinap52textintroductions/tabletspart4texts161184/]