the end of the reign of Darius I (the latest known text dates to the twenty‐ninth year of this king). However, the revolts against Darius at the beginning of his reign and a reorganization of the temple administration in the king's second year mark an important juncture: the main temple archive that was recovered by controlled excavations and by illicit diggers breaks off in this year; there is only a handful of tablets from Darius' later years (van Driel 1998; Frahm and Jursa 2011: pp. 24–29). In the aftermath of the rebellion against Xerxes, reprisals targeted those leading families of the city who had come from Babylon. The northerners were removed from their offices, the importance of the northern Babylonian gods Marduk and Nabû in the local cult was drastically reduced, and the local god Anu was promoted to chief deity in Uruk. The Urukean priesthood transferred their offices from Eanna to the Anu temple which experienced a steep ascendency at the time while the old Eanna temple was allowed to fall into ruin (Kessler 2004: pp. 250–251; Kose 1998: pp. 9–16).4 The Early Achaemenid private archives of priests (belonging to northern clans) that were excavated in private houses in the vicinity of the Eanna temple and archives that were found intermingled with the Eanna temple archive follow this “end‐of‐archives” pattern: there is no Late Achaemenid material; 484 BCE is a major watershed also in this case. The most important of these archives is the Egibi archive (the Egibis were a northern family) of some 200 tablets, of which none postdates the thirty‐third year of Darius I. In contrast, there is at least one archive of a local priestly family that was excavated in another part of the site (U 18) and that spans the juncture of 484 BCE: the Gimil‐Nanāya B archive. Other U 18 groups are Late Achaemenid: note the contracts of the Ekur‐zākir family from the reign of Darius III and the early Seleucid area that belong with the large library of literary texts associated with the family. Overall Late Achaemenid material from Uruk is scarce (also in contrast to Seleucid material) even though there are a number of stray tablets that cannot be assigned to well‐defined archives (Stolper 1990; Hackl 2017).
Larsa
This minor town in the vicinity of Uruk has left one archive of a family of businessmen that stretches from the middle of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar to the second year of Cambyses: the archive of the sons of Itti‐Šamaš‐balāṭu (Jursa 2005b: pp. 108–109). The archive is interesting for the continuity of business and also of tax and service obligations that are not visibly affected by the conquest of Babylonia by the Persians. There is some dispersed Late Achaemenid material (Stolper 1990) and one small dossier that extends from the end of the Achaemenid period to the early Hellenistic era (Jursa 2005b: pp. 109–110; more texts have been located in a private collection and will be published in the near future).
Varia
A group of texts documenting the economic and social life of communities of deported Judeans who were settled in southern Babylonia, probably between Nippur and Uruk, came to light in the 1990s on the antiquities' market (Peirce and Wunsch 2014). This group contains a few Neo‐Babylonian texts (dating as far back as the reign of Nebuchadnezzar), but the bulk of the material dates to the reigns of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius I. With the accession of Xerxes, the number of tablets decreases rapidly, but a few texts do postdate 484 BCE. The archive documents the management of the fields assigned to the deportees, their tax and service obligations vis‐à‐vis the royal administration, and aspects of the private business of some of the more affluent of these Judean families.
A small Late Achaemenid archive (seven tablets dating to the late fifth and the early fourth centuries BCE) documents the affairs of a family of landholding priests living in the village or small city of Šāṭir between Uruk and Nippur (Jursa 2005b: pp. 150–151).
Library Texts
The Late Babylonian library texts are an important testament of the vigor of Babylonian cultural life under foreign occupation. However, they have not yet been analyzed comprehensively as a group. Library texts are normally undated. If, as happens frequently, colophons naming identifiable scribes, a meaningful archeological context, or a connection with dated archival texts are also missing, dating depends on the evaluation of epigraphy and tablet formats. Owing to a lack of pertinent research, it is currently possible only to distinguish a broad category of ‘late’ texts dating roughly to the late fifth through second centuries from tablets originating in the late seventh, the sixth, and perhaps also the early fifth centuries: distinguishing Late Achaemenid from Seleucid period literary tablets is often impossible. With this general uncertainty in mind, the following major “libraries” can be assigned roughly to the Achaemenid period.
From Uruk comes the library of the Eanna temple, 400‐plus texts and fragments, having a chronological range (on the basis of archeological context and accompanying administrative texts) from the Neo‐Babylonian period to the second year of Xerxes (Pedersén 1998: p. 206; Clancier 2009: pp. 34–35; other, later temple libraries from Uruk include no, or nearly no, Late Achaemenid material and date exclusively to the Seleucid period). Two libraries of families of exorcists have been recovered in a private house, one dating to roughly 445–385 BCE, the other from the second half of the fourth to the end of the third century (Clancier 2009: pp. 58–61). The texts include predominantly magical, medical, and divinatory material, as well as school texts and some mathematical compositions (Clancier 2009: pp. 81–82).
From Babylon, we have a large group of literary texts of all descriptions that can be associated with the Esangila temple. The texts include a vast group of astronomical texts, perhaps as many as 3000 (see, e.g., Ossendrijver 2012), as well as divinatory, magical, and some medical material, other learned compositions, viz., mathematical and lexical texts, commentaries and school texts, and finally a few historical and historical‐literary compositions (Clancier 2009: pp. 205–212). The chronological distribution of the dateable astronomical material suggests, however, that the bulk of this library is post‐Achaemenid (Clancier 2009: pp. 309–311). Among the astronomical texts, the Astronomical Diaries deserve special notice. These mostly post‐Achaemenid texts are records of astronomical observations accompanied by price data, information on the water level of the Euphrates, and occasional notes on remarkable incidents of political, economic, or social nature and/or of ominous portent (e.g. Pirngruber 2012).
The excavated material from Babylon (Pedersén 2005) consists predominantly of archival texts, as detailed above, but some literary material was recovered too (Clancier 2009: pp. 147–149). According to the information given by Pedersén, this material is mostly Neo‐Babylonian or in any case predates the reign of Xerxes (see also Baker 2008). This is true for finds on the Kasr (Pedersén 2005: pp. 185–186) and on Išin Aswad (ibid. 247–272), as well as for the “libraries” found in the Ištar temple (ibid. 188–192) and in the Ninurta temple (ibid. 2325). Numerous hitherto unpublished tablets without a clear archeological and archival context cannot be dated.
In the Ebabbar temple in Sippar, a large collection of literary and scholarly tablets was recovered by Iraqi excavators in the 1980s (Pedersén 1998: pp. 194–197). The library contains omen collections, prayers, incantations, and hymns, as well as copies of some of the most important myths and epics of Mesopotamian literature. Several scribes mentioned in the colophons of these texts can be identified with priests known from the administrative Ebabbar archive (Fadhil and Hilgert 2008; Schaudig 2009); the library is thus to be dated to the (later) Neo‐Babylonian and Early Achaemenid period, 484 BCE being the terminus ante or ad quem for its deposition.
Conclusions
The total number of texts that can be dated to the Persian period cannot be established definitively owing to uncertainties of the dating of damaged tablets or of texts that can be assigned only a rough date on the basis of prosopographic, diplomatic, or epigraphic evidence. Rough approximations for the material known to us are as follows (unread tablets that are simply listed with their dates in the catalogues of the British Museum and in Pedersén 2005 have not been included):
|
Sippar
|