Abstract
The story of the " archives of Lagaba " is that of a long rediscovery of texts (nearly 500 in all) scattered among collections of tablets mostly built up in the 1930s. It began with the identification in the 1950s by W. F. Leemans and R. Frankena of records mentioning the toponym Lagaba in the collection of Liagre Böhl of Leiden. Several studies were devoted to them in the 1960s, and links were quickly established with other texts, already known, preserved at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. A decisive milestone was reached with the identification by G. Beckman of over 200 tablets " from Lagaba " in the Yale Babylonian Collection in the late 1980s. As O. Tammuz's thesis has remained unpublished, the value of these texts has been largely ignored. Other texts were subsequently and until very recently identified in the Vatican Museum and in various American, Italian, Israeli, Australian and New Zealand collections.
Reconstructed a posteriori from tablets looted almost a century ago from a secret site and scattered around the world, the Paleo-Babylonian archives of Lagaba are a perfect illustration of the difficulty of working with texts that are unfortunately cut off from any archaeological context. The first question that arises is that of their provenance : were the archives known as " from Lagaba " really found on the site of ancient Lagaba, or do they document the city from another locality ? The very delimitation of the corpus is problematic, and for each text it is necessary to legitimize its belonging to such and such a file or, on the contrary, to find arguments to exclude it from it. In the final analysis, are we dealing with one or several sets of archives ? The aim of this contribution is to show how the use of an appropriate methodology, combining sigillography and prosopography, diplomatic approach and historical analysis, can nevertheless lead to significant advances in the reconstitution and exploitation of Palaeo-Babylonian archives.
