The principal holders of this “dead” archive, more business than family, were Enlil-šumu-iddin/Murašû (20 Art I-­2 Dar II) and his son Rēmūt-Ninurta (36 Art I­-9 Dar II), before it passed on to Enlil-supê-muhur, a former bailiff or employee (paqdu, ardu) of the Murašûs and subsequently bailiff of the Achaemenid prince Aršam. As found by the American excavators of Nippur in 1893, it consisted originally of about 730 tablets. Some of these were broken in transport, thus yielding a somewhat higher number of tablets and fragments, now in Philadelphia, Istanbul, and the Hilprecht Collection at Jena, with strays in London, New York, Berkeley, and Yale (10 Art I­-1 Art II, esp. 26 Art I­-7 Dar II). Title deeds and other property documents for real estate are absent. The texts are almost entirely contracts, administrative texts are very rare.

The Murašûs’ main interest was agriculture in which they engaged predominantly as managers and entrepreneurs on an intermediate level, between the actual cultivators and the (institutional) landlords. The most frequent text genres are therefore various types of (sub-)lease contracts and receipts for rents and taxes, as well as promissory notes for agricultural produce. They specialized in extending credit to individuals or groups holding different types of land burdened with tax or service obligations, thus enabling the tenants to discharge their (money) obligations but themselves gaining control over the mortgaged fields and gardens. This included land belonging to the domains of Persian nobles and administrators. Trade is not documented in the surviving record.