The more than three millennia of ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, yearly augmented by new finds from sites across the Middle East, pro-vide a unique and, at times, extremely detailed historical record. The infor-mation, however, is very unevenly distributed in time and space – as illuminat-ing flashes rather than comprehensive overviews. The authors of this chapter draw on cuneiform sources from sites in early second millennium Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia to exemplify the challenges which even very rich material poses to modern scholars, challenges which we believe will remain even as the cuneiform record inevitably grows substantially in the future.