Until the 2010s, our knowledge of the history of the Sulaymaniyah region in the 3rd millennium BCE came mainly from the accounts of the military campaigns that the Mesopotamian kings of Akkad and then of Ur III had led there. Thus, the image we had of it was partial, but also terribly fragmentary. Thanks to new archaeological projects, we are now able to complete this vision using locally produced sources. Indeed, among all the discoveries of the last decade, cuneiform tablets were unearthed at Kunara, the ancient name of which is not known. Datable (but not dated) to the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, they were written in the Akkadian language.

Kunara is situated on the right bank of one of the branches of the Tanjaro, a perennial river in the Tigris basin. Covering just under 10 ha, it has an upper town to the west, separated from the rest of the site by a modern asphalted road. To the east are a lower town and an ultra-lower town, the boundaries of which are not well defined. The area around Kunara is heavily cultivated and irrigation works have shaped the contemporary landscape too strongly for the ancient topography to be visible (Fig. 1).

Cuneiform tablets have been found in two different buildings, in Area C, between 2015 and 2017, and in Area E in 2018. The detailed inventory of the tablets, their formal description as well as the transcription and preliminary translation of some of them have been published as the discoveries were made. 1 The aim of this article is not to repeat this information, which will be completed in the final publication, but is a response to the request of the volume's editor to place these documents in their context of writing and discovery at the scale of the buildings they came from, of Kunara itself and of the region.