550 ANNUAL KEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 5 



a porch supported by pillars standing originally on two extant plat- 

 forms. This door led into a large anteroom (L20) giving access to 

 the largest and most imposing room of the palace, Lll, located at the 

 center of a group of unusually small rooms — the reception hall of 

 the governor. The doorway from the anteroom had a massive 

 wooden door studded with copper nails, some of which were covered 

 with thin silver sheathing. The lower part of the walls of the 

 audience hall was painted in bright red, as also a dais, 0.22 meter 

 high, along the northwestern wall; the upper portion of the walls 

 was probably decorated with elaborated painted friezes, if we may 

 judge from the remarkable fresco (pi. 1, fig. 2) adorning a dark 

 corridor (Ll5b) leading to the most richly appointed water closet 

 of the palace (L25). The design of two upper bands of this painted 

 frieze, divided off vertically by the typically Nuzian twisted rope 

 motif, is geometrical; the lowest one consists of a series of panels 

 representing the conventionalized sacred tree, an ox head, and a 

 broad female face with cow's ears and Egyptian coiffure. The style 

 of this fresco is vaguely Minoan. In other rooms surrounding the 

 reception hall the lower part of the walls still retains traces of broad 

 painted black-and-gray stripes. All these rooms connected with the 

 audience hall were obviously the living quarters of the governor of 

 Nuzi, but their specific use is not easily determined, except in the 

 case of storage rooms and of the single water closet (L25) in this 

 part of the palace. It is possible, however, that one of the rooms 

 northwest of the hall was the private chapel of the ruler of the city. 



THE WRITTEN RECORDS OF NUZI 



The clay cuneiform tablets of Nuzi, dating from about 1550 to 

 1350 B. C, number more than 4,000. A few were found accidentally 

 by natives and have been known for years, but the bulk of them 

 were unearthed in the excavations of 1925-31, about half at Yorghan 

 Tepe and half on the suburban Nuzian homes. Practically no tab- 

 lets of the Nuzi period from Yorghan Tepe have been included 

 among those, numbering nearly 1,000, that have been published. 

 This cursory survey, however, will not be confined to the published 

 material. 



The archives from the houses of Tehiptilla and of Shurkitilla dis- 

 close the commercial and domestic activities of the descendants of 

 Puhishenni through four generations, but primarily those of his son 

 Tehiptilla, whose name appears in at least half of these records. 

 Judged from the 559 tablets published by Professor Chiera, most of 

 these texts are conveyances of real estate (in the form of contracts 

 of adoption, affidavits, and court decisions) by the indirect method 

 of adoption and bequest. Exchanges of fields, mortgages, loans, and 



