In this first issue of 2020, we offer a selection of papers from the workshop entitled “Waterscapes: Perspectives on hydro-cultural landscapes in the Ancient Near East”, held at the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Innsbruck, Austria, in 2018. The theme of the workshop and the respective papers are introduced in other contributions in this issue. However, I would like to take this opportunity to point out that these papers—and the field of Assyriology in general—are based on written sources. Typically, archaeology is associated with matter and objects to be used as evidence, but the papers in this issue bring us close to the discipline of history. At the same time, we remain very close to material objects, as the written sources come in the shape of cuneiform clay tablets and rock reliefs that tend to be damaged and/or incomplete regularly. I think this observation on the importance of texts for the current issue does stress an important observation that all scholars working with written sources have to deal with. We have to keep acknowledging that our source material is a collection that represents the winners—or the more powerful—in the communities that we study in two meanings. First, we read the claims and stories of those that could write, or could arrange others to write for them. Second, we work with texts that have managed to survive. Not all the tablets, parchments, papers, digits, or rocks that have been written on, are still available to us. I think these points are stressed in several of the contributions in the current issue as well. As such, I consider this issue as another great example of how our journal brings together fields that are usually not very close within the academic world, but that actually share similar methodological and theoretical questions and debates.