4.2.1 The Location of Yāhūdu and Našar

Texts from Yāhūdu, Našar, and their surroundings were not recovered from controlled excavations, and thus they lack any archaeological context which would help us to locate them geographically. As shown below, the texts do not belong to one ancient archive but several groups, some of which are closely connected to each other, while others exhibit only a few weak ties with the other groups.⁶¹⁹ However, because it appears that the texts have been traded as a group on the antiquities market and some linkage exits between the groups, it is highly probable that the texts were unearthed at a single spot somewhere in Iraq.⁶²⁰ Accordingly, we can legitimately speak of a corpus of texts.

Despite the lack of archaeological context, the chronological span and the geographical origin of the corpus can be studied, thanks to the Babylonian practice of recording the date and place of writing on the clay tablet. The two earliest texts of the corpus were written in a place called Ālu ša Yāhūdāya (C1, 20-I-33 Nbk, 572 bce) or Āl-Yāhūdāya (B1, 7-IX-38 Nbk, 567 bce), the ‘Town of the Judeans’. Already in the last years of Nebuchadnezzar (C2), the name of the village had changed to Yāhūdu, (the town of) ‘Judah’, and this name was still in use in 9 Xer (477 bce) when the last surviving document of the corpus (C53) was written. It is beyond doubt that the village was named after the geographic origin of its inhabitants: 34 per cent of people bear Yahwistic names in the documents written in Yāhūdu and an additional 6 per cent were related to someone bearing such a name. The practice of naming new settlements according to the geographic origin of their inhabitants is well attested in rural Babylonia, where place names such as Ashkelon, Sidon, and Neirab appear.⁶²¹ The state settled foreign deportees in these twin towns in order to bring new lands under cultivation.⁶²²

A place called Ālu ša Našar (‘Town of Našar’) or Bīt-Našar (‘House of Našar’) was located in the vicinity of Yāhūdu.⁶²³ A substitute of the dēkû of Yāhūdu collected a tax payment in Našar (C83), and a promissory note written in Našar stipulates that commodities are to be delivered in Yāhūdu (C84). Moreover, two people are attested in both places.⁶²⁴ Unlike Yāhūdu, Našar was not a twin town. It was both a village and an administrative estate originally held or managed by a certain Našar. This is suggested by the following evidence. First, it is clear that the toponym was named after an individual called Našar: the name is usually preceded by the determinative for masculine personal names.⁶²⁵ Second, the practice of governing the land-for-service sector through estates or administrative centres is well attested in the Murašû archive and other texts of the present corpus.⁶²⁶ Bīt-Šinqāma (C18), Ālu-ša-Ṭūb-Yāma (C8), and Bīt-Bāba-ēreš (C80) are good examples of this phenomenon in the vicinity of Yāhūdu and Našar.

Third, the toponym itself is written in several different ways which not only exhibit differences in orthography but also differences in usage and meaning.⁶²⁷ The most common form of the name is uru šá^Ina-šar (Ālu ša Našar, ‘Town of Našar’), which is attested – with its by-forms – 38 times, 33 times written by the scribe Arad-Gula/Nabû-šum-ukīn/Amēl-Ea. With two exceptions, the name refers to the place where the tablets were written.⁶²⁸ The second most common form of the name is é ^Ina-šar (Bīt-Našar, ‘House of Našar’), which is attested twelve times, exclusively on tablets written by Arad-Gula and only as the place where agricultural produce was to be delivered.⁶²⁹ Eight tablets exhibit a place name that combines features from the two previous forms, uru é na-šar (Āl bīt Našar, ‘Town of the house of Našar’) or the like.⁶³⁰ This form is used by five different scribes and it always refers to the place of writing the tablet. The Canal of Našar (íd šá^Ina-šar-ri) is attested once in C64.

An interesting pattern emerges when we look at the place names referring to Našar. There is no change over time, but Arad-Gula made a clear distinction between the place names Ālu ša Našar and Bīt-Našar. This can be seen in the documents in which both names are used: Bīt-Našar is always the place where agricultural produce is to be delivered, while the tablets were always written in Ālu ša Našar.⁶³¹ Accordingly, Bīt-Našar appears to be an estate or local administrative centre surrounded by a village that was named after it. The deliveries of agricultural produce took place at the estate, whereas the documents were written in the village.⁶³²

The presence of twin towns in the Nippur countryside suggests that Yāhūdu and Našar may also have been located in the region.⁶³³ However, there is no conclusive evidence to confirm this suggestion. None of the texts in the corpus were written in Nippur or refer to the city.⁶³⁴ Moreover, people attested in the corpus cannot be linked to external texts and their personal names do not favour deities such as Enlil or Ninurta of Nippur. Several texts were written in Babylon, but because of the city’s role as an administrative and economic centre of Babylonia, this is not an indication of proximity.⁶³⁵ Uruk and Sippar are not referred to in the corpus, but Borsippa is attested once as a place where Zababa-šar-uṣur bought a house.⁶³⁶ Yāhūdu, Hursagkalamma (Kiš), and Susa are mentioned together in a list of expenses (C54), but the document bears witness to the geographical scope of someone’s economic activities, not to the location of Yāhūdu.⁶³⁷ Našar or Bīt-Našar is referred to in external sources as well, and they seem to point towards a location in the vicinity of Borsippa.⁶³⁸

Pearce and Wunsch locate Yāhūdu and Našar in ‘the region to the east and southeast of Babylon, beyond the city of Nippur, delimited to the east by the river Tigris and to the south by the marshlands’.⁶³⁹ This suggestion is supported by several geographic names attested in the corpus. The towns of Kēš and Karkara can be located with reasonable certainty somewhere between Nippur, Uruk, and the Tigris,⁶⁴⁰ and the Kabaru canal connected Babylon and Borsippa to south-east towards Nippur and Susa.⁶⁴¹ Bīt-Amūkāni was the territory of the homonymous Chaldean tribe in Southern Babylonia.⁶⁴² Joannès and Lemaire propose that Bīt-Abī-râm, one of the three main sites of the corpus, is to be located in the region south-east of Babylon.⁶⁴³ Moreover, the Sîn canal is well attested in the Murašû archive and located in the Nippur region; a homonymous canal is referred to in B47.⁶⁴⁴ Finally, two twin towns or related haṭrus, named after the cities of Gaza and Hamath, are mentioned both in the texts from the vicinity of Yāhūdu and in the Murašû archive.⁶⁴⁵

Even though there is no evidence connecting the present corpus with the cities of Nippur or Uruk, the countryside surrounding these two cities is the most probable geographical setting for our texts. A single attestation of Borsippa and several documents referring to Babylon do not imply that Yāhūdu and Našar were located in Northern Babylonia; references to Kēš, Karkara, Bīt-Amūkāni, the Sîn canal, Hamat, and Hazatu suggest a location in Central or Southern Babylonia. Našar itself poses a problem, because the texts published by Waerzeggers indicate proximity to Borsippa rather than to Nippur or Uruk. However, it is possible that two homonymous villages existed in different parts of Babylonia. The close linkage between twin towns and the land-for-service sector of the Babylonian agriculture is apparent both in the present corpus and the Murašû archive. This does not mean that these phenomena were not found elsewhere in Babylonia, but, as regards their content, the texts from Yāhūdu and Našar fit well into the countryside of Central or Southern Babylonia.

4.2.2 The Land-for-Service Sector: Economic Environment of the Texts

The texts from Yāhūdu and Našar bear witness to the land-for-service sector of the Babylonian economy.⁶⁴⁶ The system existed already in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar ii and its most elaborate form is known from the Murašû archive in the second half of the fifth century bce.⁶⁴⁷ In short, royal land was granted to individual landholders who in exchange had to pay taxes and perform military or corvée service.⁶⁴⁸ ‘Taxes’ are to be understood here in the widest sense of the term: they also encompassed rent-like sūtu and imittu payments in kind or silver.⁶⁴⁹ The basic unit of the system was ‘bow land’ (bīt qašti), which was a plot cultivated by one or more landholders and their families.⁶⁵⁰ The size of bow lands varied greatly, but the term clearly referred to a certain type of landholding burdened with service obligations.⁶⁵¹ Ideally, the holder of a bow land was obliged to submit an archer for royal service, in the same manner as holders of ‘horse land’ (bīt sīsê) and ‘chariot land’ (bīt narkabti) were obliged to provide a horseman or war chariot, respectively.⁶⁵² However, the obligations also varied, depending on the size of the landholding in question.

In the Murašû archive, bow lands were grouped together in larger administrative units called haṭrus.⁶⁵³ A haṭru consisted of several bow lands and landholders, who often shared a common ethnic or geographic background or were members of the same military or professional unit.⁶⁵⁴ Each haṭru had a foreman called a šaknu and his subordinates, who ensured that the unit fulfilled its joint responsibilities and produced the required tax revenue. The word haṭru is not mentioned in the documents from the environs of Yāhūdu, but this is not surprising, because the term starts to appear in Babylonian sources only in the mid-fifth century bce.⁶⁵⁵ However, the related term kiṣru is mentioned in C23,⁶⁵⁶ and other haṭru-like structures appear in the corpus.⁶⁵⁷ Two documents from the fifth year of Darius i (C14 and C15), both written in Yāhūdu, list imittu rents which were owed by men bearing primarily Yahwistic names. Even though ten landholders are listed in C14 and twenty in C15, only one and two men are referred to as the nominal debtors, respectively. The nominal debtors seem to appear on the list of landholders as well, which suggests that the landholders were grouped in units of ten, represented by one of their peers.

Each of the farmers in C14 and C15 held a bow land or a fraction of such, and, according to the lists, the imittu payments originated from the fields of šušānus. In the Persian period, šušānus were semi-free persons who often held bow lands and, in the Murašû archive, were incorporated in haṭrus. Their legal status was different from slaves, but they were apparently not free to leave the lands they held.⁶⁵⁸ The term šušānu starts to appear in the texts from Yāhūdu and its surroundings in the reign of Darius i, when it becomes a common keyword in texts referring to the royal lands cultivated by Judeans.⁶⁵⁹ The expression ‘fields of the Judean šušānus’ clearly refers to collective lands, which were managed within an administrative unit. These lands fell under the authority of several officials, such as the rab urâti and the governor of Across-the-River (C18–19), and the rab ṣāb kutalli (C24–25).⁶⁶⁰

The presence of Judean šušānus and their collective fields points towards the existence of haṭru-like structures in the present corpus. Moreover, dēkûs (‘tax summoners’) are attested in the environs of Yāhūdu. A Judean dēkû is mentioned in two documents (C12; J9), and the Judean dēkû of Yāhūdu in C83.⁶⁶¹ In the Murašû archive, dēkûs collected tax payments in haṭru organisations.⁶⁶² Finally, the Murašû texts make clear that there was a direct connection between several haṭrus and homonymous towns or villages; some of these were named after the geographic origin of their inhabitants.⁶⁶³ Yāhūdu would qualify as one of the villages where the settlement of deportees and the organisation of agricultural production intertwined. In sum, it is likely that Judeans in Yāhūdu were organised in one or more haṭru-like administrative units supervised by several high officials and their subordinates.

4.3.1 Three or More Groups?

Pearce and Wunsch (2014) divide the 103 texts into three separate groups centred around different localities. The texts in group 1 originate primarily from Yāhūdu, group 2 primarily Našar, and group 3 primarily Bīt-Abī-râm. As far as I see, the same division is followed in Wunsch’s forthcoming volume. It is undeniable that the geographical origins of the texts roughly follow this division, but the classification does not do justice to the more complicated structures of the text corpus.⁶⁶⁴ Moreover, the division in three groups draws attention only to three protagonists – Ahīqar, Ahīqam, and Zababa-šar-uṣur⁶⁶⁵ – even though the roles of certain other individuals, like the scribe Arad-Gula, are central in the corpus.

Although the provenance of the tablets is unknown, it is highly likely that they all derive from the same find-spot. There are prosopographical connections between the texts written in Yāhūdu and Našar, but the texts from Bīt-Abī-râm also show faint links to the other groups.⁶⁶⁶ Moreover, the economic framework of all the texts is the same, namely, the land-for-service sector of the Babylonian agriculture. It is also significant that texts from all three key localities have found their way into the collections of Moussaieff, Schøyen, and Sofer. In the following discussion, I use the term ‘corpus’ to refer to the whole lot of 250 texts and the terms ‘group’ and ‘archive’ to refer to smaller units of texts within the corpus.

In this section, I offer a redivision of the texts in group 1 and 2 and briefly discuss the published texts relating to Zababa-šar-uṣur. I argue that the texts do not belong to three ancient archives which were later brought together, but the present corpus comprises several groups of texts and a number of isolated texts.⁶⁶⁷ All the texts came into being as a result of administrative practices in the land-for-service sector and they originally belonged to several independent archives, the exact number of which cannot be reconstructed. During administrative changes or after the death of archive-holding protagonists, the texts were sorted and some of them deposited in a larger administrative archive. The present corpus consists of remnants of this archive, being documents which were disposed of when they were no longer needed.⁶⁶⁸

My division of the texts into groups or dossiers does not imply that each of the groups comprises the remnants of an ancient archive. The division is based primarily on prosopographical criteria. The groups discussed under headings 4.3.2, 4.3.3, 4.3.4, 4.3.6.3, 4.3.7, 4.3.8, as well as the texts pertaining to Ṣidqī-Yāma/Šillimu and Rapā-Yāma/Samak-Yāma under heading 4.3.6.2, are centred around one or two protagonists and, in some cases, their families. By ‘protagonists’, I refer to persons whose activities are documented in these texts. Texts which originate from the village where a protagonist worked are not included in the group if there is no direct connection between the protagonist and the text. Accordingly, the earliest and latest documents from Yāhūdu are not included in the Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma group, although the majority of other documents from Yāhūdu indeed pertain to Ahīqam or his family members.

4.3.2 Texts Pertaining to Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma

Texts relating to Rīmūt, son of Abī-ul-īde, and his namesake Rīmūt, son of Samak-Yāma, constitute a well-defined, small subgroup. The twelve texts were written between 7 Nbn (548 bce) and 4 Cyr (534 bce) and they are assigned to group 2 by Pearce and Wunsch. This classification seems to be based on the fact that both men were connected to Ahīqar, son of Rīmūt, the main protagonist of group 2.

Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde is first attested with his sons Ah-immê and Ahīqam in Hamat in 7 Nbn (C55) and for the last time in the very same town in 4 Cyr with his son Ah-iqmê (B21).⁶⁶⁹ Five out of seven texts relating to him (B20, 22; C55, 57, 58) concern debts in silver owed by Rīmūt alone or by him and his sons to several creditors in Hamat, Bāb-ṣubbāti, Šamahunu, and Bīt-Dibušiti. The earliest of these documents (C55) concerns a harrānu venture, which, together with the predominance of silver debts in this file, suggests that Rīmūt was involved in the world of business.⁶⁷⁰ This view is further corroborated by the two documents featuring his son Ah-immê alone: C59 (2 Cyr) shows that Ah-immê was involved in fish trade in Himuru,⁶⁷¹ and C61 (3 Cyr) reveals that he was a partner in a harrānu venture in Babylon. The harrānu ventures of the father and son had to do with barley, and together with C59 this indicates that they were engaged in trade in staples. The size of the two ventures was not negligible, as C55 pertains to 25 shekels of silver and C61 to 75 kurru of barley and 30 shekels of silver. The retail of agricultural produce in cities was an important commercial activity in Babylonia, and it has also left traces in other texts of this corpus.⁶⁷² Rīmūt and Ah-immê did not work alone, and the frequent creditors, debtors, and witnesses of their documents were most likely their business partners.⁶⁷³

Several details in Rīmūt’s and Ah-immê’s documents suggest that the land-for-service sector was the economic framework of their activities. The village of Hamat (B21; C55, 56) was most probably a settlement of deportees from the Syrian city of Hamath,⁶⁷⁴ and Bitqa-ša-Anu-ibni (C55) was likely an estate named after its owner or the official in charge of it. A few Judeans are another example of deportees in these documents (C61, 83). Moreover, people associated with the royal administration were present when documents B20 and B22 were drafted; this is suggested by the šarru names of two witnesses and a scribe.

There is a possibility that Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde was the father of Ahīqar/Rīmūt, the main protagonist of the texts from Našar: he witnessed Ahīqar’s tax payment to the agent of the tax-summoner (dēkû) of Yāhūdu in a text written in Našar in 1 Cyr (C83). Moreover, both men were active in a place called Bāb-ṣubbāti (B22–23; C60), and Ahīqar and Rīmūt’s son Ah-immê were both involved in fish trade (B23; C59–60). However, there are no other prosopographical connections that would corroborate the family relationship between Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and Ahīqar/Rīmūt.

The suggestion that Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde was the father of Ahīqar is seriously complicated by the presence of a certain Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma in three texts from Hamat and Bāb-ṣubbāti in 7(?) Nbn – 3 Cyr.⁶⁷⁵ Judging by the Yahwistic name of Samak-Yāma, he was of Judean descent. The first text, C56, pertains to the voiding of a promissory note in Hamat owed by Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma. The date of the text is broken, but it is from the reign of Nabonidus and written by a scribe named Marduk-šum-uṣur/Ṭābia. This is peculiar because Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde is attested in Hamat in 7 Nbn in a document written by Marduk-šum-uṣur/Ṭābia/Dābibī (C55), who must be identical with the scribe in C56. However, the texts do not have parties or witnesses in common.

The next attestation of Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma is found in Bāb-ṣubbāti in 11 Nbn (B19). He owed a little over 3 kurru of barley to Nabû-lēˀi/Nabû-ah-iddin, who is attested as the creditor of Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and Ah-iqmê in B21. Nabû-lēˀi is not attested in any other text of the corpus. Moreover, in B19 the barley is to be delivered to Bitqa ša Anu-ibni, which is the place where two sons of Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde had to deliver their barley in C55. Another connection to C55 is the name Amurru-bēl-šamê: a certain Amurru-bēl-šamê/Dūrlāya is the investor of venture capital in C55 (7 Nbn) and Bulṭâ/Amurru-bēl-šamê is the first witness in B19 (11 Nbn). The name Amurru-bēl-šamê is not attested elsewhere in the corpus, and it is very well possible that these two people were a father and son. Finally, the toponym Bāb-ṣubbāti connects B19 to B22, with the latter text featuring Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and his son Ah-immê.

The last attestation of Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma is C60, a promissory note for 52 or 53 shekels of silver owed by Ibni-ilu/Kīnâ and Ahīqar/Rīmūt to Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma in 3 Cyr. The text specifies that the silver is the price of fish.⁶⁷⁶ Except for Rīmūt and Ahīqar, the other people in the text are not attested elsewhere in the corpus. This text was also written in Bāb-ṣubbāti, which emphasises the geographical proximity of the activities of Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma and Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde.

Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma and Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde operated in the environs of Hamat and Bāb-ṣubbāti in the reign of Nabonidus and during the first years of Cyrus. They are never attested in the same document, but they knew the same people, including Ahīqar, son of Rīmūt. What is more, they disappeared at the same time, some years before the well-documented period of Ahīqar’s business activities in 7 Cyr – 3 Dar. Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde had at least two sons, Ah-immê and Ahīqam, whereas there is no direct evidence of the sons of Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma. Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and his son Ah-immê traded in staples, but the activities of Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma are more elusive. The texts pertain to debts in silver and agricultural produce and to a sale of fish. It is striking that fish trade connects Ahīqar/ Rīmūt, Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma, and Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde’s son Ah-immê, while no other texts in the corpus refer to fish.

The texts pertaining to Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma and Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde are like a prelude to the group of texts featuring Ahīqar/Rīmūt, who is frequently attested from 7 Cyr onwards but together with the two Rīmūts already in 1 and 3 Cyr. The localities where the two namesakes worked vary significantly from the geographical environment of the Ahīqar texts, although Hamat and Bāb-ṣubbāti could not be located far away from Našar, the centre of Ahīqar’s activities. Two early texts (B23; C60) show that Ahīqar also participated in fish trade in Bāb-ṣubbāti, but the focal point of his activites shifted quickly away from this region after 7 Cyr and fish trade is not mentioned in the Ahīqar texts anymore. Other texts in the whole corpus do not pertain to the localities attested in this group.

Ahīqar helps to connect these texts to the rest of the corpus, and it is possible that either Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma or Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde was his father. This question cannot be settled on the grounds of the available evidence,⁶⁷⁷ and it cannot be ruled out that the two Rīmūts were not just namesakes but one and the same individual whose father was known by two different names. This suggestion remains speculative, and it is safer to assume that we are dealing with two different men who were both working in the same region and with the same people. On the archival context of these texts, see Sections 4.3.5 and 4.3.10.

4.3.3 Texts Pertaining to Ahīqar, Son of Rīmūt

Ahīqar, son of Rīmūt, is attested in 54 texts of the corpus.⁶⁷⁸ He was of Judean descent, which becomes apparent in the Yahwistic name of his son Nīr-Yāma, attested in only two documents (B27, 88).⁶⁷⁹ The focal point of Ahīqar’s activities was the village of Našar, located in proximity to Yāhūdu. Ahīqar was attached to the Judean community of Yāhūdu, at least from an administrative perspective, as he was liable for paying taxes to the dēkû official of that village (C83). His tax payments to dēkûs (C83; J9) also suggest that he held a bow land or a similar landholding, but the bulk of the texts show him actively expanding his activities into agricultural management. This business took place outside the Judean community, and very few texts pertain to his interaction with other Judeans.⁶⁸⁰

The evidence of Ahīqar spans over twenty-three years, from the first year of Cyrus (538 bce) until the seventh year of Darius i (515 bce). However, the chronological distribution of the preserved documents is not even: after two stray texts in 1 and 3 Cyr, 24 texts are dated in 7 Cyr – 5 Camb. As is the case in the whole corpus, no texts survive from 6–7 Camb, but a significant number of 24 texts can be assigned to 0 Bar – 3 Dar. After a break of three years, one stray text is dated in 7 Dar. The chronological distribution of these texts is shown in Figure 1.⁶⁸¹

Documents pertaining to Ahīqar

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Documents pertaining to Ahīqar

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Documents pertaining to Ahīqar

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Ahīqar’s business activities resulted in three major types of documents: promissory notes, leases of land, and contracts related to cattle and plough teams. They bear witness to the main features of his business portfolio, namely, granting credit and agricultural management. His clients were farmers in the land-for-service sector, often of non-Babylonian origin, who were in need of credit or who wanted to outsource some of their tax and service obligations. Contracts or business transactions between Ahīqar and royal officials are absent from the corpus, but this does not necessarily mean that Ahīqar ran his business without the blessing of the local authorities.

More than half of the texts pertaining to Ahīqar are promissory notes, but the origin of the debts is hardly ever made explicit.⁶⁸² They are evenly distributed over time, and the debts are almost always owed to Ahīqar, who sometimes has co-creditors. The debts are mostly in barley and dates, and several times they include a silver component as well. The produce was normally obtained from the fields and gardens of the debtors, and the due date for the debts was either in the second month after the barley harvest or in the seventh month after the date harvest. Unlike the documents pertaining to Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma (see Section 4.3.6.3), these promissory notes cannot be directly connected to leases or subleases of royal lands. There is only one uncertain attestation of an imittu rent (C68), and in all extant four leases of land, Ahīqar was the lessee. Therefore, it appears that the promissory notes reflect real credit granting and agricultural management instead of rent farming.

There is strong evidence that Ahīqar granted credit to landholders in order to help them pay their taxes. Three promissory notes for dates and barley from the troubled early years of Darius i explicitly refer to the underlying reason for the debt: Ahīqar had lent landowners silver for their ṣāb šarri tax payments, and the repayment was to be made in staples after the harvest.⁶⁸³ We may suppose that the circumstances behind some other promissory notes for dates and barley were similar, even though the reason for the debt is not made explicit. It is noteworthy that all the three ṣāb šarri payments were made during a period of political instability in 522–520 bce, when Bardiya, Darius, and Nebuchadnezzar iii and iv fought over the throne of Babylon.⁶⁸⁴ Moreover, the number of documents pertaining to Ahīqar in general peaks between 1 Bar and 3 Dar. When we analyse all the debts owed to Ahīqar, we notice that over a third of the promissory notes (14) refer to outstanding debts and six to property that was pledged to secure the repayment.⁶⁸⁵ The abundance of promissory notes in the creditor’s archive indicates that they were unpaid, bad debts.⁶⁸⁶

The large number of bad debts indicates that local farmers in Našar had difficulties in managing the tax burden, especially during the accession wars after the death of Cambyses. Ahīqar was able to provide landholders with a service that was important for them for two reasons. On the one hand, Ahīqar had the necessary capital already available when the farmers were still waiting for the next harvest; on the other hand, Ahīqar had access to silver that was needed for tax payments. Even though there is no direct evidence of beer brewing or retail of produce in Ahīqar’s archive, such activities were a necessity to convert the payments in staples into silver.⁶⁸⁷ In 3 Dar, Ahīqar invested 32 shekels of silver in a harrānu venture, but the nature of this business enterprise remains unknown (C97).

Occasionally, the strained economic situation of small farmers allowed Ahīqar to gain control of their landholdings. Plots were pledged to secure debts or they were leased to Ahīqar on terms that were disadvantageous to the landholders. Three documents pertaining to Aqria and Rīmūt, sons of Ammu, exemplify this side of Ahīqar’s business. In 5-VIII-3 Camb, the scribe Arad-Gula wrote a promissory note and two leases in Našar. Promissory note C66 concerns a significant debt of 8 kurru of barley and 20 kurru of dates owed by Aqria to Ahīqar. It was supplemented by a stipulation that Aqria’s share in a jointly held bow land be pledged to secure the payment. This information helps us to put the leases of bow lands (B24 and C67) in their proper context. Even though Ahīqar acted formally as a lessee in these documents and the produce was to be shared equally between the lessee and the lessors (Aqria in B24 and Rīmūt in C67), it is unlikely that the sons of Ammu entered into these contracts voluntarily. To pay back his outstanding debts, Aqria had to lease his bow land to Ahīqar, who probably enjoyed his half-share of the produce when the landholder himself still had to work on the field. It is likely that Rīmūt’s decision to lease his landholding to Ahīqar was dictated by similar circumstances.

Pledges and leases of land formed another crucial aspect of Ahīqar’s economic activities, namely, agricultural management. Tax payments and service obligations were not the sole economic challenge which landholders faced: they also had to cope with the high costs of setting up plough teams to cultivate their fields efficiently.⁶⁸⁸ This offered business opportunities for entrepreneurs who had the capital to buy oxen and equipment. Several documents in Ahīqar’s archive relate to oxen and to the formation of plough teams, suggesting that this type of agricultural management played an important role in his work.⁶⁸⁹ By acquiring land through pledges and leases, Ahīqar was able to control more extensive landholdings and take full advantage of the plough teams at his disposal.

The economic framework of Ahīqar’s activities is relatively clear. He profited from the opportunities offered by the land-for-service sector by granting credit to small landholders to help them pay their taxes or hire a substitute to perform service obligations. The landholders did not always manage to pay back the debts, which is demonstrated by the large number of promissory notes – unpaid, bad debts – in Ahīqar’s file. If a landholding had been pledged to secure the bad debt, Ahīqar was able to profit from the landholder’s bankruptcy and take possession of the pledged property. By pooling pledged and rented plots and forming plough teams, Ahīqar was able to efficiently cultivate large tracts of land. The activities of Ahīqar are similar to the business model of the Murašû family from fifth-century Nippur, although on a smaller scale. Landholders had to pledge their fields and gardens to secure the debts issued by the Murašûs, and if they did not manage to pay back their debts, they ended up cultivating their own plots as tenants of their creditor.⁶⁹⁰

Ahīqar did not work alone, as a number of colleagues regularly appear in his transactions. For example, Milkâ, son of Šalāmān, is attested in twelve documents, covering the whole period of Ahīqar’s high activity (7 Cyr – 3 Dar).⁶⁹¹ He features as Ahīqar’s co-creditor and co-lessee, surety, and witness to his transactions. Šīli/Aia-abī witnessed Ahīqar’s transactions five times (B27; C70, 87–88, 90) and is once attested as his debtor (C94). Šalāmān/Bušêa formed a plough team together with Ahīqar and a third partner in C75, and only three months later he owed over 22 kurru of barley and 14 kurru of dates to Ahīqar and Milkâ (C74). Taking these two transactions together, it seems to me that he was more likely a colleague than a client or tenant of Ahīqar.⁶⁹²

Ahīqar’s family plays a small role in the extant documents: his wife Bunnannītu is attested only once in the seventh year of Cyrus (J9), when she paid her husband’s ilku tax to a Judean tax-summoner (dēkû). Ahīqar’s son Nīr-Yāma features in two documents. A judicial document from the second year of Darius i (B27) relates to litigation over oxen. Because Nabû-bēl-ilī/Naˀid-ilu charged both Ahīqar and Nīr-Yāma in the lawsuit, it is obvious that the father and son had a shared interest in the oxen. Accordingly, Nīr-Yāma played a role in his father’s business, but no more evidence of this collaboration survives. Nīr-Yāma is attested without his father in 25 Dar (B88); this tablet connects him to the entourage of the royal official Zababa-šar-uṣur.⁶⁹³ In addition to Ahīqar’s wife and son, his father may be attested in the corpus as well. As discussed in the previous section, Ahīqar was possibly the son of Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde or Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma.

Ahīqar’s family tree (Figure 2) bears witness to the fluidity of the name-giving practices of this Judean family. Even though Ahīqar’s own name was non-Yahwistic and his father and wife bore Akkadian names, he chose to give a Yahwistic name to his son. This is an important reminder that names are notoriously difficult markers of identity and, in many cases, West Semitic and Babylonian names hide the Judean background of their bearer.

The family of Ahīqar

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

The family of Ahīqar

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The family of Ahīqar

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

4.3.4 Texts Pertaining to Bēl-ahhē-erība, Son of Nūr-Šamaš

All of the documents written in Našar cannot be connected to Ahīqar, and three documents (C64–65, 84) pertaining to the activities of Bēl-ahhē-erība, son of Nūr-Šamaš, comprise a small, distinct dossier.⁶⁹⁴ The documents were written in Našar between 3 Cyr and 3 Camb by the scribe Arad-Gula/Nabû-šum-ukīn/Amēl-Ea, and their contents resemble the Ahīqar texts. Two texts are promissory notes for small amounts of agricultural produce: one is issued by Bēl-ahhē-erība (C65) and another is issued by his brother Bēl-uṣuršu and witnessed by him (C84). Finally, in C64 Bēl-ahhē-erība leases the landholding of a certain Ahu-lētī to a third man. The lessee was supposed to work on the field and the landholder of the field to fulfil the ilku (tax or service) obligations and maintain the dam of the field. It appears that Bēl-ahhē-erība held the plot at his disposal and was able to lease it out under conditions that were favourable to him but disadvantageous to the landholder. Given the promissory notes issued by Bēl-ahhē-erība and his brother, it is very well possible that Bēl-ahhē-erība held the land as a pledge.

4.3.5 Scribes and Royal Administration in Našar

The dossiers of Bēl-ahhē-erība and Ahīqar are similar: both men worked in Našar, issued credit to landholders, and managed pledged landholdings. Like many such documents in the Ahīqar dossier, the two promissory notes issued by Bēl-ahhē-erība and his brother may represent unpaid, bad debts. Moreover, the two men had clients in common. Šum-iddin/Ṣillâ, Bēl-ahhē-erība’s debtor in C65, is Ahīqar’s debtor in C90 and witness to another promissory note C89. Bēl-uṣuršu’s debtor Banā-Yāma/Nubâ (C84) may be attested as a witness to Ahīqar’s ilku payment in J9.⁶⁹⁵ However, Bēl-ahhē-erība and Ahīqar are never attested together and nothing suggests that they were business partners or members of the same family.

In addition to the documents pertaining to Ahīqar and Bēl-ahhē-erība, five more texts written in Našar belong to the corpus. Two of them (B42; C13) can be linked to the family of Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma (see Section 4.3.6.3). A contract for sharing cows (B26, 4 Camb) probably entered the corpus as a retroacta – that is to say, a text that documents the ownership history of a piece of property. Because Ahīqar regularly acquired oxen to form plough teams, this document probably relates to his businesses.⁶⁹⁶ Two documents can be connected to the corpus only via the scribes who wrote them. B41 (7 Cyr) is a receipt of a house rental payment from the scribe Niqūdu/Ṣillâ/Aškāpu (see below) to a certain Ubārāia/Nabû-dalā. Although Ubārāia was Ahīqar’s debtor ten years later in C86 (1 Nbk iv), it does not seem likely that the receipt belongs to the Ahīqar dossier. B18 (12 Nbn) is a receipt for 6½ shekels of silver, supplied perhaps as provisions.⁶⁹⁷ The scribe Rīmūt/Nabû-zēr-ibni is probably attested in B22 (8 Nbn), a text pertaining to Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde.⁶⁹⁸ However, the text B18 seems to be unconnected to Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde’s activities.

The most important connection between Ahīqar and Bēl-ahhē-erība is the scribe Arad-Gula/Nabû-šum-ukīn/Amēl-Ea.⁶⁹⁹ He wrote all the documents pertaining to Bēl-ahhē-erība and 38 out of 54 (70%) documents pertaining to Ahīqar. Four of the Ahīqar texts were written by Niqūdu/Ṣillâ/Aškāpu and each of the rest of the documents by a different scribe.⁷⁰⁰ The earliest attestation of Arad-Gula is in the Bēl-ahhē-erība text C64 (3 Cyr); after a gap of four years, he is attested again in two documents pertaining to Ahīqar (B23; J9) and in a document pertaining to Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma, the central figure of the texts from Yāhūdu (C13). From then on, Arad-Gula and Ahīqar are attested together for the whole active period of the latter’s career until 3 Dar. After Arad-Gula wrote his last document for Ahīqar in 10-XI-3 Dar (C97), both men are attested only once. The last text pertaining to Ahīqar was written by Niqūdu/Ṣillâ/Aškāpu, probably in Našar in 7 Dar (C94). Arad-Gula features for the last time in Babylon in 4 Dar, together with Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma (B5).

Arad-Gula wrote almost all of his documents to three men: Ahīqar, Bēl-ahhē-erība, and Ahīqam. A single text pertains to Ahīqam’s brother Šalāmān (C80, Bīt-Bāba-ēreš, 2 Dar) and another text to the slave woman Nanâ-bihī, who was later acquired by Ahīqam (B42, Našar, 5? Camb).⁷⁰¹ According to the available texts, Ahīqar, Ahīqam, and Bēl-ahhē-erība never dealt with each other, but Arad-Gula wrote documents for all of them. Moreover, Arad-Gula’s son Bēl-upehhir was connected to all the three men. He witnessed the transactions of Ahīqar (C75–76, 92, 97), Bēl-ahhē-erība (C65, 84), Ahīqam (C13), and Ahīqam’s son Nīr-Yāma (C32).

Arad-Gula’s activity was centred in Našar, where he wrote all his documents except for three texts written in Bīt-Bāba-ēreš (B34, 39; C80) and one in Babylon (B5). The scribe Niqūdu also wrote his documents for Ahīqar in Našar, and only four Ahīqar documents were written in Našar by a scribe other than Arad-Gula or Niqūdu. When Ahīqar travelled outside Našar, the documents were predominantly written by other scribes.

Before drawing any conclusions about Arad-Gula’s role in Našar, it is necessary to focus on the scribe Niqūdu/Ṣillâ/Aškāpu. He wrote only five documents in Našar, but the chronological distribution is very different from the texts written by Arad-Gula: Niqūdu wrote both the first and the last tablet pertaining to Ahīqar in 3 Cyr and 7 Dar (C83, 94). In between, he wrote two tablets for Ahīqar in the fifth year of Cambyses (B29; C99), as well as an additional fifth tablet (B41, 7 Cyr) which records Niqūdu’s house rental payment to a certain Ubārāia/Nabû-dalā, Ahīqar’s debtor in C86 (1 Nbk iv). All tablets written by Niqūdu were drafted in Našar,⁷⁰² but, except for Ahīqar, no one is attested more than once in these five texts. Whereas the majority of documents written by Arad-Gula are promissory notes, Niqūdu wrote a variety of different text types. They include a promissory note (C94), two receipts of house rental payments (B41; C99), a sale of an ox (B29), and a receipt of tax payment (C83).

Arad-Gula’s central role in the text group is further emphasised by the observation that the break in Ahīqar texts after 3 Dar and Arad-Gula’s disappearance after 4 Dar seem to be related. The break does not result from Ahīqar’s death or retirement, because he is still attested in a single text in 7 Dar as a creditor of his business partner Šīli/Aia-abī (C94). It is also unlikely that Ahīqar or his son Nīr-Yāma sorted out the archive and disposed of useless tablets after 3 Dar: some recently bought oxen were still alive and the promissory notes for unpaid debts were still valuable. The break after 3 Dar seems to be related to administrative changes in the land-for-service sector. Arad-Gula is attested for the last time in 4 Dar, together with Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma in Babylon. Ahīqam’s peak activity in the environs of Yāhūdu started immediately after this, but his dossier attests to a very different organisational landscape and administrative structures in the land-for-service sector than any previous documents of the corpus (Section 4.3.6.3). This linkage between Ahīqar, Ahīqam, Arad-Gula, and administrative changes suggests that it was not only private business activity which connected the three men.⁷⁰³

As I argued in Section 4.2.1, the way Arad-Gula uses the place names Bīt- Našar and Ālu ša Našar relates to a distinction between an administrative estate and the village surrounding it. It is noteworthy that the deliveries of produce owed to Ahīqar systematically took place at the estate, often specifically at the gate of the storehouse. Even if the produce ended up in Ahīqar’s hands and he was a businessman in the sense that he worked for his own profit, it appears that his transactions were supervised by the local administration. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Arad-Gula was also a part of the administrative bureau at Bīt-Našar rather than just a scribe who offered his services to local farmers and businessmen.⁷⁰⁴ This is supported by Arad-Gula’s structural role in the corpus and by his strong presence in the texts pertaining to Ahīqar. Arad-Gula works as a hinge between the Ahīqar and Bēl-ahhē-erība dossiers, on the one hand, and the Ahīqar and Ahīqam dossiers on the other. During his active career in Našar, Arad-Gula recorded and supervised Ahīqar’s transactions with farmers in the land-for-service sector. Although five different scribes wrote documents relating to Ahīqar in Našar, their role was different from that of Arad-Gula: four scribes each wrote only a single document relating to Ahīqar.⁷⁰⁵ The scribe Niqūdu wrote texts in Našar before and after Arad-Gula, but the text types are different from those written by Arad-Gula. The single promissory note written by Niqūdu to Ahīqar in 7 Dar post-dates all Arad-Gula texts, and the three other documents which he wrote to Ahīqar comprise receipts for tax and house rent payments (C83, 99) and the sale of an ox (B29). The three latter texts pertain to Ahīqar’s business transactions but not to his dealings with farmers in the land-for-service sector. Although other scribes were present in Našar, Arad-Gula had a special administrative role in the village and estate.

The texts from Našar are something more complex than the remnants of the private business archive of Ahīqar. The Bēl-ahhē-erība dossier does not look like an annex to Ahīqar’s archive, a number of texts which found their way into the main archive through marriage or a business partnership. Although the business profiles of the two men are similar, they are not connected by a family relationship or by common business partners but by the scribe Arad-Gula and his son Bēl-upehhir. The relationship between Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma is equally complicated: there is no direct connection between the two and it is hard to imagine how the texts would comprise a single private archive. At the same time, the two men knew the same people and worked in the same villages. It is striking that the scribe Nabû-ēṭir/Niqūdu, who wrote two tablets for Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and his son Ah-immê in Bīt-Dibušiti in 14 Nbn (C57–58), travelled together with Ah-immê to Babylon in 3 Cyr (C61). It appears that scribes from rural villages were regularly present when people from the countryside travelled to Babylon.

Ahīqar’s transactions highlight only one side of his activities, namely, his interaction with landholders and business partners. However, the state administration supervised and authorised his undertakings, although this is not immediately visible: official titles and explicit administrative structures are absent from the texts. In any case, Ahīqar was working in the land-for-service sector, which was primarily designed to serve the economic interests of the state. He was among the people who were needed to keep the land-for-service sector running, fields cultivated, and tax payments flowing to the coffers of the empire. It may well be that Ahīqar was working for his own profit, but within the limits of royal control. Ahīqar’s clients had to deliver their produce at the estate of Našar, and it seems that Arad-Gula not only wrote documents for Ahīqar but actually supervised his and his clients’ activities. This is suggested by Arad-Gula’s omnipresence in Našar and his structural role as a link between several dossiers of the text corpus from Yāhūdu, Našar, and their surroundings. At the same time that Arad-Gula disappears from the corpus in 4 Dar, the recorded activity of Ahīqar ceases and the focal point of the corpus turns to Yāhūdu and to a completely different administrative landscape.

The personal history of Ahīqar’s son Nīr-Yāma further emphasises the importance of the state administration in the genesis of the present text corpus. He is attested only twice, for the first time together with his father in 2 Dar (B27) and for the last time in 25 Dar (B88). The latter document relates to the entourage of the royal official Zababa-šar-uṣur, the key figure in Pearce and Wunsch’s group 3.⁷⁰⁶

The dossiers pertaining to Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde, Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma, Ahīqar, and Bēl-ahhē-erība do not easily fit into a single private archive. Even if one of the two Rīmūts was Ahīqar’s father, the texts pertaining to another Rīmūt and Bēl-ahhē-erība would remain strangely unconnected to the protagonists of the archive. All these texts originate, however, in the context of the land-for-service sector. The recording of transactions was an efficient means of controlling the rural population in the land-for-service sector, and it is probable that the origins of the present corpus are to be found in the workings of the local administration. I will return to these questions in Section 4.3.10.

4.3.6 Texts Relating to Yāhūdu

4.3.6.1 General Remarks

The village of Yāhūdu (‘Judah’) is attested from the thirty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar ii (572 bce) until the ninth year of Xerxes (477 bce). The texts written in the village can be chronologically divided into two groups. The earlier one covers the years 33 Nbk – 5 Cyr, whereas the main group concerns 4–15 Dar, followed by a small number of related documents. The majority of the texts pertain to the activities of three generations of a Judean family. Rapā-Yāma/Samak-Yāma, his son Ahīqam, and his five grandsons are attested in Yāhūdu and its surroundings from the first year of Amēl-Marduk until the thirty-fourth year of Darius i (561–488 bce). Rapā-Yāma is frequently attested in the early Yāhūdu group, whereas Ahīqam and his sons are central figures in the main Yāhūdu group. Figure 3 shows the chronological distribution of the texts pertaining to Rapā-Yāma, Ahīqam, and Ahīqam’s sons.⁷⁰⁷

Documents pertaining to Rapā-Yāma, Ahīqam, and Ahīqam’s sons

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Documents pertaining to Rapā-Yāma, Ahīqam, and Ahīqam’s sons

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Documents pertaining to Rapā-Yāma, Ahīqam, and Ahīqam’s sons

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The descendants of Samak-Yāma

Cf. Pearce and Wunsch 2014, 8.

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

The descendants of Samak-Yāma

Cf. Pearce and Wunsch 2014, 8.

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The descendants of Samak-Yāma

Cf. Pearce and Wunsch 2014, 8.

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Despite the centrality of Ahīqam’s family, the texts from Yāhūdu cannot simply be characterised as their private archive. Although part of the documents may fit this description, a number of texts from the reign of Darius i appear to belong to an administrative archive. Moreover, a number of other texts written in Yāhūdu, including the two earliest documents from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar ii and the latest document from the reign of Xerxes, are difficult to connect to the family of Ahīqam.

4.3.6.4 Royal Administration in the Environs of Yāhūdu

The bulk of the documents from Yāhūdu would easily fit in a hypothetical private archive of Ahīqam and his sons, but a number of texts constitute a well-defined subgroup interconnected by Iddinâ, son of Šinqā, the deputy of the rab urâti. He is attested in eleven documents written in Yāhūdu and its surroundings in 5–12 Dar.⁷⁸² The rab urâti was a royal official or military officer who was in charge of horse teams, and, according to the Murašû texts, he had an estate in the Nippur region.⁷⁸³ Even though such an estate is not attested in the surroundings of Yāhūdu, the example of the rab mūgi’s estate makes its existence quite possible. The rab urâti himself is never attested in the present corpus, and the title occurs only in connection to his deputy. In light of his father’s Arabian name Šinqā, Iddinâ himself was of non-Babylonian origin.⁷⁸⁴ The estate of Bīt-Šinqāma was evidently named after Iddinâ’s father; this is one of the places where Iddinâ and Ahīqam negotiated the latter’s rent farming rights (C18).⁷⁸⁵

The documents pertaining to Iddinâ can be further divided into three groups. The earliest texts from 5 Dar are lists of imittu rents owed by Judean šušānus to Iddinâ, who managed their lands (B12; C14–15). Royal property was distributed as bow lands to šušānus, who were grouped together in units of ten and represented by one of the respective farmers.⁷⁸⁶ Ahīqam witnessed two of the three lists, apparently in the role of a rent farmer of the lands in question. Another three texts from 9 Dar show how Ahīqam bought rights to collect rent from local landholders (B6; C17–18). These documents elaborate on the role of Iddinâ and the administrative hierarchy of the local land-for-service sector: Iddinâ appears to have been a subordinate of a certain Mudammiq-Nabû, son of Nabû-aplu-iddin, whose title is not given in the documents.⁷⁸⁷ Ultimately, they were both subordinate to Uštanu, the governor of Across-the-River, who was responsible for the royal lands in the environs of Yāhūdu.⁷⁸⁸ Based on these six texts, the administrative hierarchy of the land-for-service sector in Yāhūdu and its surroundings is visualised in Figure 5.

Administrative hierarchy in the environs of Yāhūdu

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Administrative hierarchy in the environs of Yāhūdu

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Administrative hierarchy in the environs of Yāhūdu

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The third group of texts pertaining to Iddinâ was written in 11–12 Dar. Four documents (B7; C19–21) are promissory notes for dates or barley, concerning imittu rents from the fields of Judean šušānus. The creditor is always Iddinâ and the debtors bear Yahwistic names or patronymics. C22 resembles these documents, but the reason for the debt is not given in the promissory note. Three of the documents (C19–20, 22) can be directly connected to Ahīqam: he is a witness in C19–20, the debtors Izrīqam/Šamā-Yāma (C19) and Qīl-Yāma/Šikin-Yāma (C20, 22) are his business partners, and his brother Šalāmān is the second debtor in C20.⁷⁸⁹ The debtor of C21 witnessed a document pertaining to Ahīqam (B9), which suggests that he was Ahīqam’s acquaintance as well. Only the debtor of B7 cannot be connected to Ahīqam.

The last group of texts discussed above emphasise that Ahīqam and his sons were not the only Judeans who practised rent farming in Yāhūdu. Other people also worked as middlemen in the land-for-service sector and bought rights to collect rental payments from landholders. Although Ahīqam knew most of these people, the presence of their documents in the corpus is difficult to explain if we would like to assign all tablets from Yāhūdu to a private business archive of Ahīqam’s family.⁷⁹⁰ The same difficulty applies to the administrative lists of imittu rents (B12; C14–15). A closer look at the people attested in these documents reveals that the texts are not only interconnected by Iddinâ but by scribes and other administrative personnel as well.

The assessment of the imittu rents in B12 and C14–15 (5 Dar) was performed by a single group of administrative personnel: the witnesses are always Nabû-zēr-ibni/Il-gabrī and Bēl-ēreš/Šalāmān, and the scribe is Šamaš-ēreš/Marduk-mukīn-apli/Mudammiq-Adad. The assessment was performed in the countryside where the orchards were located, in Yāhūdu and in Ālu ša ^lúdam.nagar^meš.⁷⁹¹ Šamaš-ēreš was a frequent scribe in the environs of Yāhūdu and evidently a member of the local administration in the land-for-service sector. In addition to the imittu lists, he wrote the documents pertaining to Ahīqam’s purchase of rent farming rights in 9 Dar (B6; C17–18), two promissory notes on rental payments (C22, 24; 12 and 14 Dar), and a judicial document (B11, during the reign of Darius i).

Documents relating to Ahīqam’s purchase of rent farming rights (B6; C17–18) were witnessed by several people, some of whom appear in several other documents as well. The importance of the transactions is emphasised by the presence of the courtier (ša rēš šarri) Nabû-lū-salim among the witnesses; this is the only time when a person bearing this high official title is attested in the corpus.⁷⁹² Two other noteworthy persons on the witness lists are Bīt-il-šar-uṣur/Šalammu and his son Bīt-il-ab-uṣur. The name of the father betrays a connection to the royal administration.⁷⁹³ Bīt-il-ab-uṣur is attested in numerous other documents relating to the administration of the local countryside.⁷⁹⁴ Bēl-ušallim/Šinqā (B6–7; C17, 19–22) was a royal official but apparently of a lower rank than his brother Iddinâ.

Something changed in the administration of the land-for-service sector around the twelfth year of Darius i. Iddinâ, his brother Bēl-ušallim, and the governor Uštanu⁷⁹⁵ disappear from the documentation, and new officials are suddenly in charge of the lands managed by Ahīqam and his sons. The new functionaries include a nameless commander of the troops at the riverbank (C23: rab ṣābi ša kišād nāri), Kanzarā, the commander of the (reserve?) troops (C24: rab ṣāb kutalli?),⁷⁹⁶ and Zababa-uṣur(?), the commander of the troops of Across-the-River (C26: rab ṣābi ša Ebir Nāri).⁷⁹⁷ Even though Iddinâ and Uštanu are not mentioned any more, there was continuity in the administration of the local land-for-service sector before and after the twelfth year of Darius. People living in the vicinity of Yāhūdu were still supervised by the officials of Across-the-River, and Bīt-il-šar-uṣur and Bīt-il-ab-uṣur are attested in 9–14 Dar and the scribe Šamaš-ēreš in 5–14 Dar. If the royal estates were redistributed among the high functionaries of the Persian Empire around 12 Dar, this did not significantly affect the local land-for-service sector.

4.3.7 Texts from Āl-šarri

Āl-šarri (‘Kingstown’) was a village located not far away from Yāhūdu.⁷⁹⁸ The place name itself suggests that the fields and orchards in the vicinity of Āl-šarri belonged to the land-for-service sector: C47 and C51 were written in Āl-šarri ša qašti eššeti (‘Kingstown of the New Bow Land’). This was certainly the same place as Āl-šarri, as its name apparently fluctuated in a similar way as the name of Yāhūdu.⁷⁹⁹ Here we have yet another locality which was founded to bring new royal lands under cultivation. Ahīqam is attested there once in promissory note C41 (5 Dar). He granted credit to a certain Abdi-Yāhû/Hašdâ in order to help him hire a substitute to perform service obligations in Elam. Apart from C41, all the other six texts from Āl-šarri are difficult to connect to the rest of the corpus. They were written within twelve years in 6 Cyr – 1 Nbk iv, which is roughly contemporary with the early period of Ahīqar’s activity.

The texts from Āl-šarri centre around two persons: Iqbâ/Nabû-šum-ukīn (B2; C47, 49; 6 Cyr – 1 Nbk iv) and Bēl-lēˀi/Mīnu-ana-Bēl-dannu/Ša-nāšišu (C48–51; 2? Camb – 1 Nbk iv). They are not attested outside Āl-šarri and they had no connections to the other protagonists of the corpus. Iqbâ engaged in the workings of the land-for-service sector by leasing bow lands from their holders for cultivation (B2; C49) and granting credit to farmers (C47).⁸⁰⁰ Two of the documents pertaining to Iqbâ were written by a scribe named Itti-Šamaš-balāṭu/Bāba-ēreš (B2; C47) and the third one by Bēl-lēˀi/Mīnu-ana-Bēl-dannu/Ša-nāšišu. The latter is attested in three other Āl-šarri texts as well, twice as a scribe (C48, 50) and once as a debtor (C51). C48 is a promissory note for two shekels of silver, to be paid back at the time of the barley harvest. Both C50 and C51 pertain to sales of oxen to settle debts in silver. In C51, Bēl-lēˀi is one of the two debtors whose outstanding debt is settled by seizing an ox from the wife of Bēl-lēˀi’s co-debtor Kīnâ. As draught animals were of high value and importance, the sale of an ox to settle a debt signals a strained economic situation. It is important to note that difficulties like this are not only found among farmers of foreign origin, since Bēl-lēˀi, a scribe in Āl-šarri and a Babylonian bearing a family name, could also find himself in such a bind.

Other people in the Āl-šarri texts do not connect the text group to the rest of the corpus either. In addition to Ahīqam and his debtor, only two Judeans appear in the texts from Āl-šarri: one is a witness in C50 and the other seizes the ox in C51. However, they are not attested elsewhere in the corpus. Two other connections are possible but very unlikely. A person named Nabû-rēˀûšunu/Arad-Nabû is attested as a lessor in B2 (Āl-šarri, 6 Cyr) and as a witness to the transaction of Nīr-Yāma/Ahīqam in C26 (21 Dar, the place of writing not preserved). The gap of thirty-two years makes it unlikely that the same person is referred to on both occasions. Another hypothetical link is Šamaš-erība/Nabû-[…]-iddin, the debtor in C47 (Āl-šarri, 0 Camb). If the patronymic is amended as Nabû-zēr-iddin, a homonymous individual is attested as a witness to B21 (Hamat, 4 Cyr), a text belonging to the Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde group.⁸⁰¹ I hold both of the above suggestions to be improbable, and even if they were right, the presence of these men in C26 or B21 would not explain why the Āl-šarri texts ended up in the present corpus. These texts cannot belong to the hypothetical private archives of Ahīqar or Ahīqam, nor do they fit into group 1, where Pearce and Wunsch assign them.⁸⁰² The existence of a group of isolated texts stresses the complicated archival structure of the corpus.

4.3.8 Texts Pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur and Bīt-Abī-râm

Texts pertaining to the royal official Zababa-šar-uṣur and to the estate of Bīt-Abī-râm are assigned to group 3 by Pearce and Wunsch, and the great majority of them remain unpublished. Zababa-šar-uṣur is attested in seven texts published by Joannès and Lemaire (J1–7),⁸⁰³ and Bīt-Abī-râm is the place where C102 (1 Cyr) was written. Moreover, C101 (Hazatu, 5 Cyr) should be included in this group as well, because it can be linked to the rest of the corpus only via Nabû-zēr-iddin/Balāssu, the creditor in C102.⁸⁰⁴ According to Pearce and Wunsch, text C103 (Bīt-Ṭāb-Bēl, 3 Xer) belongs to this group as well, but no person or place in this text is attested elsewhere in the corpus.⁸⁰⁵ This makes the total number of published texts nine or ten, depending on the choice to include C103 or not. The publication of a hundred or so texts from this group is forthcoming (see Section 4.1), which means that all the following conclusions are preliminary at best and need to be adjusted when more texts become available.⁸⁰⁶

The context of C101–103 and J1–7 is similar to that of the other texts in the corpus. They relate to the cultivation and management of royal lands in the Babylonian countryside, and the structures and terminology of the land-for-service sector are apparent in many of the texts. Zababa-šar-uṣur/Nabû-zēr-iddin, the steward of the crown prince’s estate (rab bīti ša bīt ridûti), is the central figure in texts J1–7. According to the information available in Pearce and Wunsch 2014, he is attested in 1 Nbk iv – 5 Xer (521–481 bce), and the peak of his activities is centred in the years 19–28 Dar (503–494 bce). The chronological distribution of the Zababa-šar-uṣur texts in Joannès and Lemaire 1996 and Wunsch (forthcoming) is shown in Figure 6.⁸⁰⁷ In the available sources, he appears as the manager of the crown prince’s lands (J2–4), a creditor (J1, 5), a lessee (J6), and perhaps as a debtor (J7). The name of this official with its šarru element is a good example of Beamtennamen in first-millennium Babylonia.⁸⁰⁸

Documents pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Documents pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Documents pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

In J2–4, Zababa-šar-uṣur is not an active protagonist, but only referred to as the manager of royal lands in texts pertaining to a certain Barīk-Tammeš/Zēria. The latter was a rent farmer of the lands belonging to the crown prince’s estate:⁸⁰⁹ in three documents (J2–4) written in the seventh month of 21 Dar, three different persons owe him significant amounts (18, 30, and 100 kurru) of dates as an imittu rent. These dates were produced in three different localities on the lands of the crown prince’s estate. According to the information available in the indices of Pearce and Wunsch 2014, Barīk-Tammeš is attested in an additional two promissory notes related to rental income (B45–46), both written in the seventh month of 21 Dar, again in two different locations. Interestingly enough, all the localities attested in these five documents are hardly referred to in any other texts in the corpus. Only Kār-Adad is attested once in B79.⁸¹⁰ Accordingly, B45–46 and J2–4 appear to constitute a well-defined subgroup, which allows us a glimpse of agriculture practices at the estate of a very high-ranking person in the Persian Empire. As would be expected, the owner of the estate had appointed a steward to take care of his landholdings in the Babylonian countryside. In turn, the steward Zababa-šar-uṣur outsourced the everyday management of the estate’s lands to rent farmers, one of them being Barīk-Tammeš, who collected the rental payments from the farmers or their representatives.⁸¹¹ The hierarchy is somewhat similar to the one at the governor Uštanu’s estates near Yāhūdu.⁸¹²

The rest of the published texts pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur are more random and shed light on various sides of his activities. An important text (J6) from 26 Dar shows him visiting Babylon, where he leased a large plot of 45 kurru (circa 60 hectares) of land from a certain Bagazuštu/Marharpu.⁸¹³ The lessor appears to be a high official of Egyptian origin: his first name is Iranian but patronymic Egyptian, and he is explicitly referred to as ^lúmiṣirāya (‘Egyptian’).⁸¹⁴ His official title, ša rēš šarri ustarbaru, which can be translated roughly as ‘courtier’ or ‘chamberlain’, shows that Zababa-šar-uṣur interacted both with local farmers and high officials in the Persian administration.⁸¹⁵ It is not clear whether Zababa-šar-uṣur leased the lands in an official capacity or for his own personal interests, but judging by the inclusion of Bagazuštu’s bow land, the rented property included or consisted of royal lands.⁸¹⁶

Two promissory notes from 6 Dar (J1) and 22 Dar (J5) are similar in various ways: the creditor is Zababa-šar-uṣur, but he bears no official title, the debts are rather small and their origin is not explained, and the delivery of the staples is to take place in Bīt-Abī-râm after the date harvest, even though the debts are in sesame, barley, and sheep. What is important is that both tablets bear an Aramaic epigraph referring to the name of the debtor. Two other published tablets (C102; J7) from this group bear Aramaic epigraphs as well, which makes the proportion of Aramaic epigraphs on the published Zababa-šar-uṣur/Bīt-Abī-râm tablets (40%) significantly higher than in the corpus in general.⁸¹⁷ The obverse of J7 (4 Xer) is almost completely lost, but the Aramaic epigraph on the reverse refers to Zababa-šar-uṣur, which may suggest that he was the debtor of this document.⁸¹⁸ The fourth Aramaic epigraph is found on document C102 written in Bīt-Abī-râm, and it probably also refers to the debtor of the document; see more on this text below. If the number of Aramaic epigraphs is equally high in the unpublished tablets of the Zababa-šar-uṣur and Bīt-Abī-râm group, it provides us with important information on the use of Aramaic in the royal administration in Babylonia of the mid-first millennium.

Texts C101 and C102 do not pertain to Zababa-šar-uṣur, but they are connected to group 3 via Nabû-zēr-iddin/Balāssu, who is the creditor in both documents. The texts were written in Bīt-Abī-râm (C102, 1 Cyr⁸¹⁹) and Hazatu (C101, 5 Cyr), and they concern debts in barley which were due after the harvest in the second month. The barley fields belonged to the land-for-service sector, which is suggested by the reference in C102 to a pledged bow land and in C101 to a person managing the fields. Like Barīk-Tammeš/Zēria in J2–4, Nabû-zēr-iddin was a rent farmer on royal lands, and he is also attested in the earliest text pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur (B75, 1 Nbk iv).⁸²⁰ The place names in these two texts are noteworthy: C102 is the earliest attestation of Bīt-Abī-râm, and Hazatu in C101 is yet another example of a twin town in Babylonia, this time referring to Gaza.⁸²¹

Promissory note C103 (3 Xer) is one of the latest texts in the corpus and almost completely isolated, even though Pearce and Wunsch assign it to group 3.⁸²² The references to the estate and slave of a certain Uštanu remind the reader of the homonymous governor of Across-the-River, but any link to group 3 seems to be missing.

Due to the limited number of texts available at the time of writing this study, very little can be said about the connections between the Zababa-šar-uṣur dossier and other text groups in the corpus. The following remarks are thus preliminary and must be reviewed when more texts become available. First, it can be noted that the texts pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur and Bīt-Abī-râm are not closely related to the Judean community in the environs of Yāhūdu, but they originate from the same economic environment. Only one Judean (Nabû-uṣur/Dalā-Yāma in C101) is attested in the ten texts discussed above, and the same applies to the whole group as well.⁸²³ However, the texts evidently relate to the land-for-service sector, shedding light on how the estates of Persian royalty were administered and their fields were cultivated. Despite the absence of Judeans, the presence of people with non-Akkadian names and the twin town of Hazatu suggest that groups of foreign origin were living in the villages surrounding the crown prince’s estate.⁸²⁴

Second, there are a number of important connections between the Zababa-šar-uṣur dossier and the rest of the corpus. It is noteworthy that Ahīqar’s son Nīr-Yāma is attested as a debtor in B88, a promissory note for silver written in Dibtu in 25 Dar.⁸²⁵ The witnesses and the scribe are not attested elsewhere, but the creditor Aplâ/Šamšāia is a central person in the dossier pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur. He is attested in ten Zababa-šar-uṣur texts, including document J6, a lease which he witnessed in Babylon.⁸²⁶ Nīr-Yāma’s connection to Zababa-šar-uṣur’s entourage suggests that people in the environs of Našar came in touch with or under the influence of the crown prince’s estate in the early fifth century at the latest. Another important link between the Zababa-šar-uṣur texts and other groups in the corpus is the royal administration. The scribe Arad-Gula plays a central role in Našar, the presence of royal officials is notable in the Ahīqam texts, and Zababa-šar-uṣur himself was a royal official. Finally, the Zababa-šar-uṣur dossier is chronologically related to the texts pertaining to Ahīqar and Ahīqam. The corpus can be divided into three successive phases: Ahīqar’s peak activity in 7 Cyr – 3 Dar, Ahīqam’s activity in 4–15 Dar, and Zababa-šar-uṣur’s activity in 19–28 Dar. These issues will be discussed in more detail in Section 4.3.10.

4.3.9 Loosely Connected and Isolated Texts

A number of texts cannot be easily assigned to any of the previous groups, but all of them adhere to one of the general characteristics of the corpus: they refer to Yāhūdu or Našar, or some people with Yahwistic names appear in them. Accordingly, it is probable that these documents also originate from the same find-spot as the rest of the corpus. At the same time, they emphasise the complicated structure of the corpus, as they highlight the internal heterogeneity of Pearce and Wunsch’s groups 1 and 2.

B11 is a verdict on the ownership rights of a ram (reign of Darius i, place broken). The document was written by the well-attested scribe Šamaš-ēreš/Marduk-mukīn-apli/Mudammiq-Adad, who wrote several documents in the environs of Yāhūdu.⁸²⁷ The parties of the litigation, Il-lindar/Nabû-zēr-iddin and Nadab-Yāma/Abdi-Yāhû, also appear in C16, which pertains to litigation over rental income between Ahīqam and Nadab-Yāma (9 Dar, the town of Amurru-šar-uṣur on the Zabinā canal). Il-lindar is among the witnesses in C16, but nothing suggests that the legal cases were connected. Other witnesses or the scribe of C16 do not appear in other documents. It is possible that Ahīqam bought the ram at a later point in time and received B11 as a further proof of legal ownership. However, the administrative connection is again noteworthy and may better explain why B11 ended up in the corpus: the scribe Šamaš-ēreš was a central figure in the administration of the local land-for-service sector.

The latest documents of the corpus, C52–53, were written in the seventh and ninth year of Xerxes, respectively (479 and 477 bce). The texts come from the same region and from the same economic environment as the earlier texts of the corpus, but the people appearing in these late texts are not attested elsewhere. The texts show that the text corpus was not affected by Xerxes’ reprisals against the rebelling Babylonians in his second regnal year.⁸²⁸ Promissory note C53 for imittu rents from Yāhūdu bears witness to the continuity of Judean settlement and the basic structures of the land-for-service sector until the fifth century bce. Nevertheless, the organisation of or the terminology relating to the land-for-service sector had changed over time: the fields of šušānus or estates of royal officials are not referred to, but the fields are instead said to be located in a pardēsu, a Persian royal estate.⁸²⁹ C52 is a sale of a slave woman and her child, witnessed by a Judean and written in uru é ha-˹am-ma˺-[…], which may be identical to the previously attested village of Hamat.⁸³⁰ Apart from that, nothing connects this text to the rest of the corpus.

B3 is a peculiar text pertaining to the transfer from father to daughter of a slave woman and a share in a cow. Something had gone wrong and the original tablet was apparently lost, which prompted someone to draft the present document. Its genre is difficult to establish, but following Wunsch, it can be characterised as a ‘reconstruction of lost bequest record and quest for expert witness’.⁸³¹ The slave woman bears the Egyptian name Huṭuatā,⁸³² but all the other persons are Judeans. The name of the scribe and the time and place of writing are not recorded. The last witness Sidqī-Yāma/Natīn may be identical to the homonymous witness in the marriage agreement from Yāhūdu (A1), but no one else is attested in other documents.

In B4, a Judean man hires a substitute to perform royal service duties in Elam.⁸³³ The document is written in Yāhūdu in 10 Dar, and it provides us with important information about the service obligations and ways to deal with them in the land-for-service sector. Even though the document is dated to the period of Ahīqam’s peak activity, only the scribe and perhaps two witnesses can be connected to him or his sons.⁸³⁴

B17 is a broken contract for cultivation, and none of its protagonists or witnesses can be identified in other documents. The text was probably written in Yāhūdu in the eleventh year of Darius i. It is possible that the contract is somehow connected to the business of Ahīqam and his sons, but the damaged tablet does not yield such information.

C54 is a list of expenses, like a note for personal use. A date is not given. The tablet refers to a number of place names, including Yāhūdu, Hursagkalamma (Kiš), and Susa.⁸³⁵ The text cannot be connected to other documents in the corpus, but its wide geographic scope suggests that it was more likely related to the royal administration than Judean farmers.

4.3.10 Administrative Practices and the Origins of the Text Corpus

The preceding discussion of the texts from Yāhūdu, Našar, Bīt-Abī-râm, and their surroundings has revealed that the documents cannot be easily assigned to a single private or institutional archive. They certainly stem from the same geographical area and economic context of the land-for-service sector, but the texts belong to several groups. These groups seem to be interlinked by scribal and administrative practices, which emphasises the role of the state in the origins of the text corpus. In order to understand the forces which brought the text corpus into being, this section will discuss the relations between the text groups in detail. The meagre number of available texts from Bīt-Abī-râm hinders attempts to link these texts with the rest of the corpus, and the following discussion thus focuses on finding factors that interconnect the other text groups with each other.

The first impression of the texts from Yāhūdu, Našar, and their immediate surroundings is that they constitute two groups, one documenting the business activities of Ahīqam/Rapā-Yāma and his sons and the other those of Ahīqar/Rīmūt. However, a closer look reveals that there are two groups of texts which precede the activities of Ahīqam and Ahīqar. The first one not only pertains to Ahīqam’s father Rapā-Yāma but also includes other early texts from Yāhūdu. The group featuring Rīmūt/Abī-ul-īde and Rīmūt/Samak-Yāma is like a prelude for the business activities of Ahīqar/Rīmūt. One of the men could be the father of Ahīqar, but this connection would not explain the inclusion of the texts pertaining to the other Rīmūt. Further investigation reveals more subgroups, which pertain to the village of Āl-šarri and to a certain Bēl-ahhē-erība from Našar. Some isolated texts resist being connected to any other documents.

Ahīqam and Ahīqar are never mentioned in one and the same document, even though they must have known each other. They were contemporaries, men of Judean descent, who lived in close proximity to each other. They both worked in the land-for-service sector, being liable for paying taxes to the same dēkû official (C12, 83), and Ahīqam once visited Našar, the focal point of Ahīqar’s activity (C13). They both knew the scribe Arad-Gula and his son Bēl-upehhir. Šalāmān, the brother of Ahīqam, is once attested in Bīt-Bāba-ēreš (C80) on the very same day when Ahīqar visited the village (B34).⁸³⁶ Moreover, promissory note B42, relating to the ownership history of Ahīqam’s slave woman Nanâ-bihī, reveals that Nanâ-bihī’s previous owners were active in Našar.⁸³⁷

The most peculiar feature of the texts pertaining to Ahīqam and Ahīqar is their chronological distribution. Both men are first attested in the reign of Cyrus, Ahīqam in two texts referring to a tax payment and the settlement of his father’s debts in 5 and 7 Cyr (C12–13). The first two Ahīqar texts were written in 1 and 3 Cyr, but the main period of his business activities extends from 7 Cyr until 3 Dar, including a break in 6–7 Camb. Only one Ahīqar text was written after the third year of Darius i (C94 in 7 Dar), whereas Ahīqam’s business activities took place in 4–15 Dar. The chronological distribution of the documents directly pertaining to Ahīqar and Ahīqam is presented in Figure 7.

Documents pertaining to Ahīqar and Ahīqam

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Documents pertaining to Ahīqar and Ahīqam

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Documents pertaining to Ahīqar and Ahīqam

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

However, as was shown above, the nature of Ahīqar’s business was very different from that of Ahīqam and the contents of the text groups do not show continuity from one file to another. In the same vein, the geographical focal point of the texts shifts from Našar to Yāhūdu when Ahīqam starts his business activities. The abrupt end of the Ahīqar file and the sudden start of Ahīqam’s activities are hinged by a text written in Babylon in 15-V-4 Dar (B5), which is the earliest document pertaining to Ahīqam’s own business activities. The promissory note for over five minas of silver and five sheep owned to Ahīqam by a certain Banā-Yāma/Abdi-Yāhû was written by the scribe Arad-Gula. The debt was to be paid back within one month in Yāhūdu, and we may encounter the debtor Banā-Yāma again in C36 (13 Dar), now as the creditor of Ahīqam. B5 stands out from the patterns we see in the texts pertaining to Ahīqam, Ahīqar, and Arad-Gula, and it implies that the Ahīqam and Ahīqar texts were not fully independent from each other. The text might be related to Ahīqam’s beer brewing and retail sale activities in Babylon, but the presence of Arad-Gula creates the impression that the text somehow marks the transition from the Ahīqar-Našar group to the Ahīqam-Yāhūdu group.

Despite the centrality of Ahīqar, Ahīqam, and the latter’s son Nīr-Yāma in the texts from Našar and Yāhūdu, two other persons played an extremely important role as well. Arad-Gula/Nabû-šum-ukīn/Amēl-Ea and his son Bēl-upehhir are present in numerous documents as a scribe and witness but never as active parties in the transactions. Arad-Gula wrote the majority of documents pertaining to Ahīqar but also two documents relating to Ahīqam (B5; C13), and his son is attested as a witness to the transactions of Ahīqar (C75–76, 92, 97), Ahīqam (C13), and Ahīqam’s son Nīr-Yāma (C32).

Arad-Gula seems to have been more than a mere scribe in a small village. As I argue above, Našar was not only a rural village but also an administrative estate in the land-for-service sector. It is highly unlikely that Arad-Gula just lived in Našar and wrote documents for Ahīqar, Ahīqam, and others who lived in or visited the village. Instead, Arad-Gula probably belonged to the administrative personnel of the estate, who not only recorded but also supervised the transactions of the local farmers (see Section 4.3.5). It is noteworthy that Arad-Gula is attested from 3 Cyr until 4 Dar (536–518 bce), but the only text (C86) written in Našar during the short rebellion of Nebuchadnezzar iv is not written by him but by Lâbâši-Marduk/Arad-Nabû/Sîn-imitti, who is not otherwise attested. Changes in local rule may have been reflected in the status of Arad-Gula as well.⁸³⁸

Arad-Gula’s role is further clarified by three documents pertaining to Bēl-ahhē-erība/Nūr-Šamaš (Section 4.3.4). The transactions are similar to those of Ahīqar, even though he is not mentioned in these texts. Bēl-ahhē-erība’s debtor in C65, Šum-iddin/Ṣillâ, was also Ahīqar’s debtor and a witness to his transaction (C89–90), but the strongest link between Bēl-ahhē-erība and Ahīqar are Arad-Gula and his son Bēl-upehhir. The scribe wrote all three tablets pertaining to Bēl-ahhē-erība (C64–65, 84), and two of them were witnessed by his son (C65, 84). If Bēl-ahhē-erība was not Ahīqar’s business partner, his documents most likely found their way into the corpus via Arad-Gula and Bēl-upehhir.

Other scribes were also involved in the administration of the land-for-service sector. As discussed above, Šamaš-ēreš/Marduk-mukīn-apli/Mudammiq-Adad was attached to the administration of the royal lands in Yāhūdu and its surroundings in 5–14 Dar (see Section 4.3.6.4). Neither was Arad-Gula’s and Ahīqam’s journey to Babylon unique: Ah-immê/Rīmūt and the scribe Nabû-ēṭir/Niqūdu are attested together in Babylon in 3 Cyr (C61), and the same Nabû-ēṭir wrote two documents pertaining to Ah-immê’s father Rīmūt in Bīt-Dibušiti in 14 Nbn (C57–58).

The text groups of the present corpus did not originally belong to a single large archive, but they were created and brought together by the administration of the land-for-service sector. It seems probable that the business dossiers of Ahīqam and Ahīqar existed originally as independent units and that they were held by the Judeans themselves. Some other groups of the archive, such as the texts pertaining to Bēl-ahhē-erība, have a similar background. The word ‘business’ should be understood in the widest sense of the term: a distinction between private business and official administration can be misleading, because men like Ahīqar and Ahīqam had a central role in the running of the land-for-service sector.

By recording their transactions, the state administration supervised the rural population in the land-for-service sector. Changes in the administrative hierarchy affected all the members of this system, and they are also reflected in the composition of the text corpus. A noticeable change took place during the first years of Darius i. The peak activity of Ahīqar ceased and that of Ahīqam started at the moment of administrative changes in the environs of Yāhūdu and Našar. It is hardly a coincidence that the term šušānu appears for the first time in the fourth year of Darius (C33) and that evidence for haṭru-like units of landholders cannot be found before the fifth year of his reign. The scribe Arad-Gula disappeared from the scene after the fourth year of Darius, but new administrative personnel had arrived in the countryside: Zababa-šar-uṣur is attested in the first and Iddinâ/Šinqā in the fifth year of Darius.

The transition from the Ahīqar texts to those of Ahīqam marks a shift to a very different administrative landscape. In the course of this transition, the documentation relating to the previous period was no longer needed, and it was sorted and deposited in an administrative archive. It is also noteworthy that no Ahīqam texts survive from 8 Cyr – 3 Dar, although his business had to have been running already before 4 Dar. This implies that the tablets documenting the early phase of Ahīqam’s business activities were deposited around the fourth year of Darius, but they have not come down to us. Just like the Ahīqar tablets, these documents were not needed anymore after the reorganisation of the land-for-service system.

Other texts found their way into the corpus in a similar way: the texts from Āl-šarri and those pertaining to Bēl-ahhē-erība document economic activity in the land-for-service sector before the early reign of Darius. The dossiers were created independently, but they were deposited in a single administrative archive. This explains how isolated texts and administrative documents found their way into the corpus as well. All the texts clearly originate from the same geographical and economic environment of the land-for-service sector in the surroundings of Našar and Yāhūdu.

The career of Zababa-šar-uṣur, the steward of the crown prince’s estate, also started at the time of administrative changes in the late reign of Cambyses or the early reign of Darius. As can be seen in Figure 8, the texts pertaining to Zababa-šar-uṣur constitute the third and last phase of the corpus. According to published texts and the indices of Pearce and Wunsch 2014, Ahīqam and his sons had no contact with Zababa-šar-uṣur, but Ahīqar’s son Nīr-Yāma was in touch with a person in Zababa-šar-uṣur’s entourage in 25 Dar (B88). This suggests that people and local administration in the environs of Yāhūdu and Našar came under the influence of the crown prince’s estate in the late reign of Darius at the latest. These developments resulted in the final composition of the corpus. Zababa-šar-uṣur is attested until the fifth year of Xerxes and the last document of the corpus, C53 from Yāhūdu, was written in the ninth year of Xerxes. Around this time one or more administrative archives were sorted and a number of texts pertaining to the land-for-service sector in the environs of Yāhūdu were disposed of. These disposed documents comprise the corpus of texts discussed in this chapter.⁸³⁹

Main text groups of the Yāhūdu corpus

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Main text groups of the Yāhūdu corpus

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Main text groups of the Yāhūdu corpus

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide