About Late Babylonian Signs (LaBaSi)

Texts and archives

by Reinhard Pirngruber

Broadly speaking, the material basis for the LaBaSi is constituted by two large groups of texts: archival texts, that is legal and administrative documents, on the one hand, and historiographic, or may better chronographic texts on the other. An exhaustive overview of the extant material is provided by M. Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents. Typology, Contents and Archives (Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Records, Volume 1) Münster: Ugarit Verlag 2005. The paragraphs below are neither exhaustive nor representative for the material, but rather serve to give a brief description of the material basis of LaBaSi.

In the first place, the database draws on legal and administrative texts from Babylonia dating from the eighth to second centuries BCE. In fact, there is not very much material from the eighth and early seventh century, but an impressive number of texts is available from the late seventh to the early fifth century. This period between the establishment of the Neo-Babylonian Empire by king Nabopolassar in 626 BCE and the so-called ‘end of archives’ in 484 BCE in the aftermath of two failed revolts against the Achaemenid king Xerxes is now being referred to as the ‘long sixth century’. Thereafter, the documentation subsequently diminishes, and the final centuries of the first millennium BCE are represented by increasingly few tablets from two sites, namely Babylon and Uruk. It should be obvious that the institutional framework of Babylonia (embodied in administrative structures etc.) underwent significant changes throughout the period in question, and as corollary, this holds true for the associated documentary text types, too.

As regards the long sixth century BCE, the most sizable archives from the Neo-Babylonian period are the institutional archives of two temple households. The larger of these is the archive of the Ebabbar temple from the city of Sippar, consisting of roughly 35,000 tablets. These tablets came to light in the course of excavations led by Hormuzd Rassam in the 1880s for the British Museum, where they consequently have been housed since. Second comes the Eanna archive from Uruk, of which ca. 8,000 texts are extant. A significant portion of these tablets came to Europe via the antiquities market – put less candidly, they stem from illicit excavations – and are scattered over a wider range of museum collections, with particularly important dossiers in Yale, Princeton, Paris, London, and Berlin. The Vorderasiatisches Museum also houses those parts of the Eanna archive that were found during the German excavations in the 20th century. Importantly, there are structural differences between Ebabbar and Eanna archives, which manifest themselves in a varying textual record. The former mainly contains primary documents keeping immediate track of the circulation of (not only) agricultural goods and livestock, often in the context of sacrifices, and other valuables, such as precious metals for cultic paraphernalia. Also the various labour and rent and tax obligations owed both by the temple to the crown and by individuals to the temple are meticulously recorded. The archive thus conveys an impression of the temple’s storage facilities day-to-day business. In addition to such administrative texts, the Eanna archive not only contains a considerable number of legal documents, such as trial records emanated from the temple court, but also more secondary accounts, i.e., records compiled from the more ephemeral primary documents.

In addition to temple archives, there is a host of private business archives from all over Babylonia dating to the long sixth century. Typologically, a distinction between entrepreneur and rentier-type activities is sometimes made. The latter are typically members of the traditional urban elites, owning prestigious assets such as real estate in the vicinity of their city of origin and, if belonging to the priestly classes, also temple offices (prebends), which they tend to manage in a conservative manner. In archives of entrepreneurs on the other hand, there is a stronger focus on trade with staple goods, financial intermediation and/or agricultural management on behalf of others, often the temples or the crown. The largest one, consisting of some 1,700 tablets, stems from the capital city of Babylon and traces the dealings of the Egibi family over five generations, thus about a century. Starting out as traders in agricultural goods (onions, dates, wool) on a rather modest scale, they managed to amass an impressive amount of wealth, which they subsequently invested inter alia by acquiring plots of land to be transformed into date orchards, thereby increasing the land’s productivity (and their own revenue). Under the Achaemenids, their economic power translated into political leverage, as by this time the Egibis also managed to gain access to lucrative rent-farming contracts. Usually however, the scope of the archives of such agricultural entrepreneurs is much smaller. An illustrative example is the archive of a certain Iššar-tarībi from Sippar. About twenty-five tablets provide us with snapshots of the career of a merchant without any affiliations to the temple community or the royal administration, but trading mainly in beer and textiles.

Examples for archives of the rentier type include the Bēl-remanni or Šangû-Šamaš A archive from Sippar and the Ilia A archive from Borsippa. Marduk-šumu-ibni, the main protagonist of the latter was active as a prebendary brewer in the service of the Ezida temple of Borsippa, and in addition his family owned a significant number of date orchards near the city which were rented out to tenants. The documentation of Bēl-remanni’s archive is overall quite similar; this archive shows the distinctive feature that it contains also texts relating to scribal education within the family (e.g. in the form of sometimes poorly copied duplicats of economic texts). A particularly interesting archive is the Ṣāhit-ginê A archive, whose chief protagonist Marduk-rēmānni was not only a high-ranking member of the temple community – he held the office of temple scribe, ṭupšar Ebabbar – and owner of multiple prebends, but also an energetic entrepreneur trading in beer and wool.

It has been pointed out above that the documentation at our disposal diminishes significantly after 484 BCE. However, the distinctions between temple and private archives, and in the latter category between entrepreneur and rentier type archives, remain useful heuristic tool. For example, among the tablets found in the Seleucid strata of the Rēš temple in Uruk is a large number of sales of (and service contracts pertaining to) prebends and (mostly urban) real estate, involving the old-established urban elites. The archive of Murašû family from Nippur dating to the last quarter of the fifth century BCE documents the activities of a family of entrepreneurs in rural Babylonia in the Late Achaemenid period. Another relevant archive of this period to be mentioned is the Esangila archive from the city of Babylon, which provides insights into the running of Babylonian temples under first Persian and later Greek overlords.

It is also the libraries of the Esangila to provide us with the second category of text used for this palaeographic database, namely the Astronomical Diaries. These texts are a set of cuneiform tablets recording a variety of observed celestial, climatic, ecological, and economic phenomena, as well as giving accounts of historical events. They comprise the largest collections of observational data available from the Ancient World, consisting of hundreds of tablets dating from ca. 650 – 60 BCE. They have typically been studied by historians of astronomy and economists with a focus on factual content but often disregarding the extrinsic aspects of the tablets themselves. Owing to their coherence and to the fact that a large number of these texts dates to the final centuries of the first millennium, i.e., to a period in which there is a dearth of archival sources, they are a repository of palaeographic information that is still largely untapped.

Department of Near Eastern Studies

Project leaders: Michael Jursa, Reinhard Pirngruber

Research assistants: Matthias Adelhofer, Yuval Levavi

Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities

Developer: Daniel Schopper

Assistant Developers: Peter Andorfer, Ksenia Zaytseva

Logo design: Sandra Lehecka

• cuneiform.de
• http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/
• http://nabucco.arts.kuleuven.be/
• http://cdli.ucla.edu/
• http://www.achemenet.com/