The book focuses on the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters dated to Nabopolassar and the first half of Nebuchadnezzar’s reigns (ca. 626–580 BCE); this is the formative phase of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The 215 letters in the corpus...
moreThe book focuses on the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters dated to Nabopolassar and the first half of Nebuchadnezzar’s reigns (ca. 626–580 BCE); this is the formative phase of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The 215 letters in the corpus come from the two major Neo-Babylonian temple archives known today: Eanna, temple of Ištar, in Uruk (190 letters), and Ebabbar, temple of the son god Šamaš, in Sippar (25 letters). Two letters from Babylon are additionally included as appendices A and B (one of which is of the still crown prince Nebuchadnezzar from the battlefield at Harran).
In many ways, these letters are the closest we get to the erratic drama which was day-to-day life in Babylonia at the mid first millennium BCE. The letters were a vital administrative tool, necessary for the ongoing functioning of these institutions. As such, they provide first-hand testimony for the tasks and obstacles that the Neo-Babylonian bureaucrats faced. As of yet, no systematic attempt has been made to date and contextualise the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters and they have never been studied as a group, and they are still one of the most underrepresented and underexploited source material in Neo-Babylonian studies. This is due to the lack of up-to-date editions, the “elusive nature” of epistolography (namely the difficulty in accurately dating and contextualising the letters), as well as the unique philological difficulties of the texts. Thus three interdependent goals stand at the base of this study:
1. Establishing new, up-to-date editions of the early Neo-Babylonian letters from Eanna and Ebabbar
2. Studying these letters as a distinct text group
3. Contextualising the letters
The first part of this work, chapters 2–6, analyses the letters as a distinct text group with its own characteristics. The letters are examined both as a source for their authors’ sense of identity and mentality, as well as for the structure and administrative setting in which these authors were active. Following the introduction (chapter 1), which lays out the historical and scholarly basis for this study, chapter two examines the formal aspect of epistolography (e.g., structure and stock phrases). It then discuss two main methodological issues: the rhetorical analysis of the letters, and the problem of dating. In chapter three I discuss the “non-content” aspects of epistolography: viz. the language, the tablets themselves, and the logistics involved in epistolographic activity. At the core of the discussion chapters (2–6) stands chapter four, in which I examine aspects of officialdom in the temples. Following a discussion on the concepts of (good) service (maṣṣartu) and “administrative sin” (ḫīṭu), I go on to focus on the different interactions as revealed in the letters. Here, the slightly different administrative structure of the two temples, as well as substantial difference in their size, requires the distinction between Eanna and Ebabbar (the former naturally takes most of the focus). Starting with the inner interaction of temple officials with their colleagues within the same institution, the discussion then zooms out to examine the interaction of temple officials with other temples and state’s institutions. Chapter five surveys the main subject matters discussed in the letters, highlighting the contribution of the epistolographic perspective to the study of the temples’ day-to-day operation. In the sixth and concluding chapter of the discussion, a diachronic perspective is introduced, and the early Neo-Babylonian letter corpus is compared to the earlier Neo-Assyrian letters from the State Archive of Assyria (SAA), and to the later epistolographic material from the second half of the long sixth century (late Nabonidus and Achaemenid letters).
The second part of the book, chapter seven, presents up-to-date editions of the 215 letters in the corpus. These include translation, transliteration, and contextual and philological commentary. Close attention is given to the contextualization of the letters; vis-à-vis dates, prosopography, and administrative and historical settings.
