Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 67

Excavations in this northern Babylonian city yielded several private archives that are relevant in the present context, but most important of all, they brought to light the largest Neo‐Babylonian archive of all, the archive of Ebabbar, the Sipparean temple of the Sun god (Jursa 2005b: pp. 116–133). The main temple archive extends from the mid‐reign of Nebuchadnezzar to the second year of Xerxes: it comes to an end after the defeat of the Babylonian rebellions against Persian rule. The known part of the archive contains some 2500 tablets from the Persian period; many more are hitherto unpublished. During the first decades of Persian rule, all aspects of Ebabbar's administration are reflected in the archive, but from the third decade of Darius' reign onward the distribution of the text types shifts toward more ephemeral groups: this is an inactive archive that was deposited in a storeroom after the removal of current files, title deeds, and other texts of immediate or lasting concern. Several private archives, mostly of priestly families, follow the Ebabbar archive's chronology and come to an end in 484 BCE. Foremost, one should mention the Ṣāit‐ginê A archive (c. 200 tablets) of a family of priests and entrepreneurs who made a career in Sippar after moving to the city from Babylon (Waerzeggers 2014), the Šangû‐Šamaš A archive, which belonged to priests who also worked as exorcists and kept a library of medical and magical material in their house (184 economic tablets and 88 medical tablets), and a small group of less than 30 texts that deal with the business of several branches of the Ša‐nāšišu family, a clan that held high temple and provincial offices in Sippar and Babylon before the rebellions (Waerzeggers 2003/2004: p. 159; Jursa 2007: pp. 76–77). Recently, an archive of a merchant engaged in long‐distance trade with Iran was published (Pirngruber 2020).