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 | reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses: c. 1200 tabletsreign of Darius I until the second year of Xerxes: c. 1400 tablets |
| Borsippa | reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses: c. 450 tabletsreign of Darius I until the second year of Xerxes: c. 1400 tablets |
| Babylon, Kiš, Nippur, Dilbat | reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses: c. 600 tabletsreign of Darius I until the second year of Xerxes: c. 1200 tablets |
| Uruk | reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses: c. 800reign of Darius I until the second year of Xerxes: c. 90 |
| Total | Cyrus and Cambyses: 3050; Darius I (including the first years of Xerxes): 4090 |
Structurally, these texts are no different from those of the preceding Neo‐Babylonian period; most of the larger archives straddle the year of conquest, 539 BCE. There was not fundamental change at this juncture. What internal developments can be seen are gradual, not abrupt. The social groups to which the archive holders belong include many priests as well as entrepreneurs and traders of various degrees of prosperity (archive‐holding craftsmen and subsistence farmers are attested but rare); and there are of course the huge archives of the Eanna and Ebabbar temples. The contents of the tablets include household and property management and various types of business (agricultural matters, local and long‐distance trading, tax and income farming, manufacturing, financial transactions ranging from small‐scale money‐lending to ambitious investments in business companies; Jursa 2010). Apart from occasional references to the Great King (always a distant and shadowy figure), to members of the royal family and their personnel, and to Persian officials (e.g. Tavernier 2007), Persian rule is reflected most clearly in the documentation for tax and service obligations, where one hears, for example, about the construction of several royal palaces, the building program of Darius in Susa, and the construction of a canal (the Kabar canal) that was to link southern Babylonia with the Susa region (see Chapter 67 Taxes and Tribute and Tolini 2011).
From later periods, we have fewer than 100 tablets dating to the reign of Xerxes from all of Babylonia (after 484 BCE). From the rest of the fifth century (reigns of Artaxerxes I and Darius II), there are perhaps as many as 1500 tablets (it is not always possible to assign isolated texts dated to the reign of an Artaxerxes to one of the three kings of that name). The most important find spots are Babylon, Borsippa, Cutha, Kiš, and Nippur; tablets from the south (Ur, Uruk, Larsa) are far less numerous. In the fourth century, there is a further decrease in tablet numbers: perhaps around 400 tablets can be dated to this period (on the assumption that the bulk of the Artaxerxes tablets of the Esangila archive dates to Artaxerxes II or III). Only a handful of tablets dates to the reign of Darius III. The most important fourth‐century find spot is Babylon; also Kiš and Borsippa in the north and Ur in the south yielded some coherent groups. Notable tablet groups, apart from the Esangila archive, include the highly anomalous Murašû archive from Nippur and the Bēlšunu and Tattannu archives. While the former is the archive of a family of Babylonian businessmen active within the sphere of state‐sponsored agriculture and tax farming, i.e. in an area of the economy that is documented, albeit in a different form, also in the early Achaemenid period, the latter two archives belonged to extraordinarily rich Babylonian families with close ties to the Achaemenid government, and, in one case at least, with a tradition of holding high offices: this stratum of Babylonian society is not well represented in the earlier period. The comparatively small number of sources notwithstanding, much is known about the institutions of Achaemenid rule over Babylonia during the Late Achaemenid period because of this particular socioeconomic setting of the material.
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