Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection. Part Four, Documents from Selected Archives

Muenster : Zaphon, 2025.

Arkhipov I., Bennett E., George A. R., van Koppen F.

This volume continues the task of publishing the Schøyen Collection’s Old Babylonian archival documents, already begun with two volumes of letters and one volume of school texts. The last few letters—ten late Old Babylonian exemplars mainly from Dūr-Abiešuḫ—are included here alongside twelve other documents from archives deriving from the same site. These add materially to knowledge of life in this garrison town at the end of the dominion of the kingdom of Babylon founded by Hammurabi’s ancestors. Among the Collection’s other Old Babylonian tablets, two other archives were easily identified and are edited in these pages. These are, first, the archive of a textile workshop from the reign of king Išbi-Erra of Isin, at the very beginning of the Old Babylonian period, from which twenty-two tablets have reached the Collection; and second, the archive of an animal-fattening shed from the reign of king Rīm-Sîn I of Larsa, in the middle Old Babylonian period, which is represented by fifty tablets and perhaps six more. Thus the 110 tablets published in this volume shed light on administrative practices in Babylonian economic institutions across three hundred and fifty years of history, while political power resided first in Isin, then in Larsa, and finally in Babylon itself.

Keywords: Ancient Near East

Publication based on the results of: From Antiquity to Modernity: Epistemology of the Development of Spiritual and Material Cultures in Non-Western Societies (2025)