When in 1951-52 a joint expedition of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and the Turkish Department of Antiquities conducted excavations at Sultantepe, a large mound between Harran and the modern Turkish city of Urfa, a collection of Assyrian cuneiform tablets was discovered, probably the products of a school attached to the large temple which occupied the summit of the mound in Assyrian times.

Unlike the tablets of Alalakh, which were published in Occasional Publications No. 2, the Sultantepe tablets are not documents of political events and of everyday life, but are copies of the traditional poems and other literary works of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Some of them are new; others help towards the reconstruction of the text of the famous epics already known from tablets discovered at other Assyrian sites, such as Nineveh and Assur.

This first volume contains the cuneiform text of 111 tablets, including all the epical and historical material in the collection, as well as a certain number of religious and medical compositions. Apart from the fragments of well-known works, which need no separate treatment, most of these texts are of considerable length, and their translation, which presents many difficulties, mainly owning to the bad condition of the tablets, is not attempted in this volume. This will be a task for scholars of Assyriology in future years. Seventy-six texts have been copied by Dr. Gurney and thirty-five by Dr. Finkelstein. A brief summary of the nature of each text is given in the table of contents.