Motion verbs and the ventive in the correspondence of Samsi-Addu, the king of Upper Mesopotamia (early eighteenth century <scp>bc</scp> )

Abstract The Akkadian ventive is now well understood as a marker that points to the location of the speech act participants. Nonetheless, there remain other domains of its usage which still need clarification. We endeavour to describe these domains of the ventive’s usage, relying upon a single-writer corpus of 178 Old Babylonian letters – those of Samsi-Addu, the king of Upper Mesopotamia (early eighteenth century bc ), which contains c. 500 tokens of the ventive.