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The Economy of the Prebendary System in Hellenistic Uruk Julien MONERIE (Phd Student Université Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne – Arscan UMR 7041)

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The Economy of the Prebendary System in Hellenistic Uruk Julien MONERIE (Phd Student Université Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne – Arscan UMR 7041) The economy of the prebendary system in Hellenistic Uruk Julien MONERIE (PhD student Université Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne – ArScAn UMR 7041) Note : Please note that this paper is a provisional version for discussion, and must not be quoted. « But the priests went in by night, according to their custom, with their wives, and their children: and they eat and drank all up » (Daniel 14.14) The existence of the Mesopotamian institution of the isqu (sumerian GIŠ.ŠUB.BA), usually defined as « the right to an income from the temple in return for a service connected to the cult »1, can be traced back to the end of the third millenium B.C. As such, the isqu-system played a major role in the economy of the Sumero-Akkadian temples, and the owners of isqu shares could rely on regular revenues, mostly paid in kind (barley, dates, meat portions...)2 and partly derived from the remains of the offerings presented to the gods in their temple provided they carried out the corresponding cultic duties. As a matter of fact, the institution was so tightly linked to the organization of the Babylonian cult that it was seen as one of its prominent features, as one can clearly see from the biblical episode of Daniel unmasking the priests of Bel. According to this episode, the priests of Babylon came back at night to the cella of Bel, along with their families, to eat and drink the ritual offerings and make people believe their god was alive, until the prophet Daniel revealed their trickery to king Cyrus (Daniel 14.1-22). Although this importance of the isqu-system in the Mesopotamian cultic organization remained paramount until the very end of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization, the institution did not remain unchanged over the two millenia of its history. Its main trend seems to have been a slow evolution from a strictly personal grant closely tied to the fulfilling of cultic duties to a fully alienable property, as the bonds between cultic service and income rights gradually became more loose3. This evolution is one of the reason why isqu is usually translated by « prebend », a notion borrowed from Western European ecclesiastical history, which is partly anachronical but convenient, and has been generally accepted among scholars. The « late » stage of the evolution of this Mesopotamian prebendary system is particularly well documented for the city of Uruk, in Southern Babylonia. Two sanctuaries, the Bīt-Rēš, dedicated to the god Anu, and the Irigal, the sanctuary of the goddesses Ištar and Nanaya, dominated the religious life of the city at this time. The site yielded about seven hundred administrative and legal cuneiform texts on clay tablets, dating from the Late-Achaemenid and the Hellenistic period, and as far as the beginning of the Parthian period, a period usually labelled as « Late-Babylonian »4. The tablets were found mostly in the preccincts of these sanctuaries, by both legal and illegal excavations, between 1850 and 19845. Among these, almost two hundred dealt with prebends6. Spanning over two centuries, from the very beginning of the third to the very end of the 1 BONGENAAR 1997 : 140. 2 Payments in silver are sometimes attested, but they seem to have been much less frequent. See e.g., for Borsippa, the oxherds of the Ezida in the Neo-Babylonian period (WAERZEGGERS 2010 : 297-299) or, for the Late-Babylonian period, the brewers' archive of Borsippa (MONERIE forthcoming a)). 3 This evolution has been thoroughly studied by VAN DRIEL 2002 : 54-66 and CORÒ 2005 : 11-38. 4 This designation usually refers to the last stage of the Sumero-Akkadian documentation, between the reign of Darius II (423-405 B.C.) and the last cuneiform tablet, dated to 61 A.D. 5 On the history of the foundings from Late-Babylonian Uruk, see CLANCIER 2009 : 28-42. 6 The prebend documentation from the other cities of Babylonia remains rather sketchy for this period: Babylon did not yield any legal cuneiform text concerning prebends, and the organisation of the isqu-system in the sanctuary of Esagil remains only attested by indirect administrative texts (cf. BOIY 2004 : 248-249), as is the case for the Ezida sanctuary of Borsippa (cf. MONERIE forthcoming a)). Overall, only three Hellenistic legal documents dealing with second century B.C.7, this rich corpus, with a both varied and consistent documentation, has constantly drawn attention from the very beginning of assyriological research8. A sizeable proportion of these documents, however, still remain to be published. Thanks to the help of the scholars in charge of their publications9, who allowed me to study these documents, new observations on what has often been described as the « prebendary market » of Late-Babylonian Uruk can now be proposed10. The whole picture of the prebendary system, however, still remains far from complete. As a matter of fact, we have serious reason to believe that the cuneiform contracts on clay tablets conserved in the temples were not prominent items from a legal point of view, and that some of the prebendary transactions were actually written on (perishable) leather documents, which are irreparably lost to us11. The fortune of conservation added some lacunae to our documentation, with the result that only a few types of prebends present sufficient information for study and often with hazardous chronological distribution, alterning densely documented short-time periods with wide gaps of silence. These features, of course, considerably impede our understanding of the system. Nevertheless, the corpus remains remarkably rich for Antiquity, and provide sufficently detailed information to study the features and trends of the prebendary economy of Late-Babylonian Uruk. After having considered the general organisation of the isqu-system and its evolutions in the course of the first millenium B.C., I will then concentrate on the price data of the Hellenistic Uruk corpus, and finally attempt to propose and interpretation of their evolution. Let us consider first the general organization of the prebendary system in the First Millenium B.C.12. It appears rather clearly from the documentation that the isqu-system did not include the whole temple community. On this matter, the Hellenistic Uruk corpus provide some information about non-prebendary occupations within the sanctuary: the lower-middle stratum of the permanent staff, for instance, was paid with standard food allowances (kurummātu)13, as was also probably the case for its lower stratum, formed by various types of dependant workforce, such as the oblates14. These strata were then excluded from the redistribution circuit of the cultic prebends were found outside Uruk up till now: two come from the Ekur of Nippur (VAN DER SPEK 1992 txt. 1 and 2) and one from the Ebabbar of Larsa (OECT 9 26). 7 The latest tablet dealing with prebends is actually the most recent cuneiform text found in Uruk (KESSLER 1984). It is dated from 108 B.C., and deals with the transfer of a butcher's prebend. The Parthians took over Babylonia for the first time in 141 B.C., and then permanently from 127 B.C. onwards. 8 The first study of Hellenistic prebend sales from Uruk was OPPERT / MÉNANT 1877 : 291-334. For the more recent studies, see DOTY 1977, MCEWAN 1981, FUNCK 1984 and lately CORÒ 2005. 9 I would like to thank especially Pr. Ben Foster, in Yale University, who allowed me to go through the texts of the forthcoming YOS 20 volume, and for the London texts, in would like to warmly thank Pr. Christopher Walker, the Trustees of the British Museum, and Mrs. Paola Corò-Capitanio, who is in charge of the publication of a new set of tablets from Hellenistic Uruk. 10 The subject has already been tackled by G.J.P. McEwan (1981, especially : 109-120). The increase of the available documentation since thirty years, though, justifies a reevaluation of the data. 11 The tablet OECT 9 24, a sale receipt dating from 228 B.C. and concerning several prebend-shares, presents an unusual phrasing and ends with a note indicating that the tablet is the copy of an original leather document established the preceding month (r. 32 : šaṭārānū šuāti gabarû kušgiṭṭi ša ina arhu ayyāru ša šatta agâ epšu « these documents are a copy of a leather-document made in the month ayyāru of this year »). On this document and its implications, see CLANCIER 2005. 12 For a detailed presentation of the isqu-system, see VAN DRIEL 2002 : 33-151. More specifically, for the First Millenium B.C., see JURSA et alii 2010 : 155-168. 13 For Hellenistic Uruk, these standard food allowances consisted in a most likely yearly income of 6 kor (= 1080 l.) of barley, 6 kor (= 1080 l.) of dates and 15 minas (= 7,5 kg) of wool. Another standard type, maybe intended for higher status occupations, consisted in two units of this standard allowance. Only few can be said about the occupations corresponding to these incomes: OECT 9 48 mentions a goldsmith (kutīmu) allowance, BRM 2 56 (= YOS 20 71) seems to deal with the allowance of a carpenter of the sanctuary (nagāru ša bīt ilāni) and BRM 2 33 mentions an allowance attached to the occupation of gatekeeper (atû). 14 Several Hellenistic administrative texts from the Esagil of Babylon attest the fact that the oblates (širku) were given rations (see BOIY 2004 : 274-275). Little is known about this institution in Hellenistic Uruk (see MCEWAN 1981 : 59). offerings, that formed a prominent part of the prebendary incomes. Nevertheless, the borders of the isqu-system were not identical with those of the redistribution circuit, since at the other end of the temple hierarchy, the administrative board of the sanctuary, as well as some specific clerical positions, received portions of sacrificial meat through the redistribution circuit without occupying prebendary positions, as clearly appears in the so-called « Meat distribution Protocol » of the Eanna temple of Uruk15.
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