WP5: Dossiers in the Late Eanna Archive

Description

The Late Eanna Archive comprises texts written from the late reign of Nebuchadnezzar to the reign of Darius whose intrinsic and extrinsic features make them distinct from earlier Eanna tablets in several respects (Jursa and Gordin 2018, Pirngruber 2021). In contrast to the Early Eanna corpus dominated by administrative records, this part of the Archive features a significant number of legal documents, among them numerous court documents. Since the early years of Assyriology, those texts have been studied for the insight they offer into Babylonian law. This focus on individual texts has overshadowed the archival perspective, a notable exception being the Gimillu Dossier [see recently Jursa 2004b and Kozuh 2014], whose link to the end of the Archive has been strongly postulated (van Driel 1998: 67–68, Jursa 2005: 138). Apart from adding to already identified Dossiers (e.g., the Gold Thieves [Renger 1971], the Forty Thieves of Uruk [Sandowicz 2014], the House of Nanāya-ēreš [Sandowicz, Wunsch, and Zawadzki, in press]) and identifying new ones, WP 5 will examine the distribution of Dossiers in chronological perspective and study the extent to which they coincide with crucial moments of Neo-Babylonian and Urukean history, such as the beginning of Nabonidus’ reign, the period postdating Nabonidus’ return from Teima, the mid-reign of Cyrus, and, in particular, the abrupt and still inexplicable end of the Eanna Archive in Darius’ second year (most recently Kessler 2018).

WP-Lead

Warsaw

Tablets