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INTRODUCTION A. Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Texts

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INTRODUCTION A. Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Texts: Their Contents and Provenance The textual legacy of southern Mesopotamia during the seventh, sixth and fi fth centuries BCE stands out for its abundance. The vast majority of these texts pertain to legal and administrative, rather than literary, matters. Loans, contracts, sales, marriages, adoptions and other day-to-day affairs were recorded on clay tablets by scribes writing in cuneiform script. Thousands of these tablets are known to today’s scholars, while many more are believed to exist and await discovery or publication.1 Modern Assyriological scholarship refers to these texts as Neo-Babylonian legal and administrative texts. They offer pictures of many aspects of Mesopotamian socio-economic and legal institutions in the centuries immediately preceding the Common Era. From the point-of-view of political history, the term ‘Neo-Babylonian’ refers to a specifi c historical period, which begins with the rise of the Babylonian king Nabopolassar in 626 BCE,2 and lasts until the end of the reign of Nabonidus, when Cyrus and the Achaemenid Persians con- quered Babylonia in 539 BCE. However, because the cuneiform textual record continues unchanged for a considerable time after the Achaeme- nid conquest, for the purposes of studying cuneiform law there is no reason to distinguish between texts written before and after Babylonia came under Persian control. Thus, when the term ‘Neo-Babylonian’ is used to describe cuneiform texts, rather than a specifi c historical period, it can refer to texts written during the Achaemenid period and even to texts written later, during the Hellenistic period (after 330 BCE).3 1 For estimates of the actual numbers, see Michael Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents: Typology, Contents and Archives (Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record, 1) (Münster, 2005), p. 1. 2 All dates follow R.A. Parker and W.H. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.– 75 A.D. (Providence, 1956). 3 See Olof Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 B.C. (Bethesda, 1998), pp. 181–182 and Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Docu- ments, pp. 1–2. Note that both Pedersén and Jursa include texts from Babylonia before the rise of Nabopolassar in the discussion of ‘Neo-Babylonian’ texts. 2 introduction This book adopts the broader use of the term ‘Neo-Babylonian.’ It considers texts that date to the reigns of the Babylonian kings from Nebuchadnezzar II (son of Nabopolassar) through Nabonidus, as well as texts dating to the Achaemenid emperors as late as Darius II. Despite their abundance, most Neo-Babylonian legal and administra- tive texts come from just fi ve cities in southern Mesopotamia: Babylon, Borsippa (modern Birs Nimrud and Tell Ibrahim al-Khalil), Nippur (Nuffar), Sippar (Abu Habba) and Uruk (Warka).4 For the most part, they stem either from private archives or temple archives.5 The private archives contain texts pertaining to the property and business dealings of individuals or families. Among the more famous examples of Neo- Babylonian private archives are the Egibi archive from Babylon, the Ea-Ilūta-bāni archive from Borsippa, and the Murašû archive from Nippur.6 These are only three of the more extensive private archives among numerous others.7 There are far fewer temple archives; less than ten are known.8 Nevertheless, temple archives were much larger than private archives. Thus, texts from temple archives, particularly the Ebabbar temple at Sippar and the Eanna temple at Uruk, dominate the Neo-Babylonian text corpus.9 These texts pertain to administra- tive aspects of these institutions, such as the delivery of goods to the temple, the organization of temple workers and the redistribution of resources by the temple. The classifi cation of Neo-Babylonian texts into archives poses numerous challenges. First, because most of the Neo-Babylonian legal and admin- istrative texts do not come from well-documented excavations, exact details about fi nd-spots are often missing. Thus, the assignment of a 4 Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, p. 2. Other sites, also discussed by Jursa, have not yielded nearly as many texts as these fi ve. 5 For discussion of the published Neo-Babylonian texts from the palace archives at Babylon (the so-called “Kasr” texts) see Pedersén, Archives, pp. 183–184 and Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, pp. 60–61. On the somewhat anach- ronistic use of the term “archives,” see G. van Driel, “The ‘Eanna Archive,’” BiOr 55 (1998), pp. 61–62. 6 For a survey of these and other private archives, including the numbers of tab- lets included in each, see Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, pp. 60–152. 7 Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents enumerates some 90 known private archives. 8 Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, p. 59 n. 359. 9 For an estimate of the size of the Ebabbar archives, see Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, pp. 117–118. For the Eanna archive, see Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, p. 138..
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