Abstract
The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg houses a collection of ca. 2,500 cuneiform tablets, representing almost every period in the evolution of this ancient script. The majority of the Hermitage's tablets were originally acquired by Nikolai Petrovich Likhatchev (1862-1936), a Russian historian and collector, and entered the museum in 1938 after his death. The Paleo-Babylonian part of the collection contains ca. 230 texts. Some of them are well known and studied, primarily thanks to the publications of V. Schileico and A. Riftin. However, half remain unpublished. This includes texts of various genres including letters, legal and administrative documents dating from the 19th to 18th century BC . The paper will present a brief review of this corpus, focusing on the most interesting tablets (e.g., a text from the " dynasty of Mananâ " and a few letters).
