Babylonian

The thousands of Babylonian texts form an extremely varied corpus that documents individual destinies and collective activities alike. This documentation is of a legal, administrative and socio-economic nature and is spread over a large number of archives on clay tablets, the most significant of which come from two types of sources.

the sanctuary archives

Ebabbar, the temple of the god Šamaš at Sippar in northern Babylonia, and Eanna, the temple of the goddess Ištar at Uruk in the south, produced texts that are highly representative of the diversity of administrative practices and daily administration.

They are also good testaments to the power maintained by the great institutional organisations under the joint control of the official administration and the local notables. These two archives show no break with the previous neo-Babylonian period, but they both stop around the early 5th century BC.

the private archives

A few major private archives of entrepreneurs document the multifarious activities and the family lives of city notables who often served the Crown in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, in Babylon (Egibi family) or in Nippur (Murašû family).

The political upheavals experienced in Babylonia at the start of Xerxes’s reign provoked a major break, putting a stop to most of the major private archives in the Babylon region, with the exception of those found in the old royal palace (Kasr archive); the situation at Nippur, Uruk or Ur seems to have been less dependent on political ups and downs.

Francis Joannès (université Paris 1) / February 2014

Achemenet in Korp 2020

The on-line Achemenet Babylonian texts are now also available as a linguistic text corpus “Achemenet in Korp 2020” at http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023062102. The Korp version of Achemenet (http://www.achemenet.com/ University on Nanterre) is a snapshot of Achemenet Babylonian texts from December 2020, which have been automatically lemmatized at the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (University of Helsinki).

Using the Achemenet text corpus in Korp allows extensive searches on the texts and presents the results as a KWIC concordance list. No installation of software is needed. It also offers statistical information on the search results and enables the user to download them. The corpus is currently available for beta testing, and the final version will be published later this year.

For more information, please visit the metadata page for “Achemenet in Korp 2020” at http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023062101. For a short helpful user guide on this type of ancient text corpus at Korp, see the user guide for “Oracc in Korp 2021” at http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2022031705

Saana Svärd (University of Helsinki) / July 2023