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Thousands of cuneiform texts dating to the 200 years of Persian rule over Babylonia are housed in various museum collections. Excluding from consideration Achaemenid royal inscriptions written in Babylonian, the corpus can be usefully divided into archival documents and library texts. The former include legal documents, administrative notes, letters, lists, and similar text types. They necessarily have to be studied within the context of the archive to which they belong. The most important criterion for judging the nature of an archive is the presence, or absence, of title deeds for real estate and other document types of long‐lasting value. A group that does not contain such texts is likely to be an “inactive” or “dead” archive, i.e. a group that has been discarded or set aside for being of no further use to its owners: a fact that obviously has a bearing on the historical interpretation of the tablets. The blanket term “library texts” includes literary compositions, texts of religious or magical contents, school texts, and “scientific” material such as divinatory compendia, lexical lists, or medical compositions (for the distinction between archives and libraries, see, for example, Pedersén 1998: pp. 1–9 and 2005: p. 10). The large number of texts from the period notwithstanding, the main find spots are few. They are surveyed here in geographical order, moving roughly from north to south. (Unreferenced information can be traced back to Jursa 2005b, a comprehensive listing of the then known archives, with descriptions of their contents and bibliography.)

The chronological distribution of the material is uneven. The conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus in 539 BCE left nearly no trace in the nature of the documentary record; archives continue, tablet formats and tablet contents remain unchanged (e.g. Jursa 2007). For practical reasons distinctions can be made between the period of the Teispids, Cyrus, and Cambyses, and the reign of Darius I. This division does not imply fundamental differences in the nature of the sources but rather in the way they reflect Persian rule over Babylonia. On the other hand, the revolts against Xerxes in the second year of his reign (484 BCE) are a major watershed:¹ with very few exceptions, the large archives of northern and central Babylonia that constitute the rich source material for the “Long Sixth Century” that began with the rise of the Neo‐Babylonian state at the end of the seventh century BCE come to an end. For the subsequent 150 years of Babylonian history under the Persians we have only above a quarter of the sources that are available for the first 50 years of this period. The archives that end in 484 BCE include two huge temple archives that span the entire sixth century as well as numerous archives of priestly families and Babylonian businessmen who had connections to the institutions of local (i.e. Babylonian) government. Southern archives and archives of Babylonian families who had close dealings with the royal administration or who at least were lacking the problematic links to the priestly class and the Babylonian city elites continued (Waerzeggers 2003/2004: pp. 158–160): the fate of an archive around 484 BCE is thus also a shibboleth for the socioeconomic placement of the archive holder(s). (In the following survey of the documentation, we use the label “Neo‐Babylonian” for texts dating to the period of the Neo‐Babylonian Empire, “Early Achaemenid” for Persian period texts up to the second year of Xerxes [even though “Teispid and early Achaemenid” would be more precise], and “Late Achaemenid” for all later tablets of the Persian period.)