Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 69

This city yielded a rich crop of private archives and remnants of the temple archive of Ezida, the main temple of the city. This material, housed primarily in the British Museum, dates predominantly to the early Achaemenid period. Of the more than 1850 tablets, many are still unpublished (Waerzeggers 2010).³ Some of these archives are large: the Rēˀi‐alpi archive contains more than 400 tablets, the Ilia A archive over 250, and the Ea‐ilūtu‐bani group around 325. Most of the archive‐holding families were of priestly origin, and the texts refer to their involvement in the cult and the management of their estates. The archives are also by far the best source we have on early Achaemenid taxation. The priestly archives and the Ezida texts, in particular the iškaru file, come to an end in 484 BCE and display the pattern typical of “end‐of‐archives” groups: property documents and the like of the last generation are missing (Waerzeggers 2003/2004: p. 156). The only significant archive that straddles the dividing line of 484 BCE is the Tattannu archive (Jursa and Stolper 2007). This archive, whose chronological range is unusually long, from the late sixth to the early fourth century, consists of the business documents of an extraordinarily rich family of landowners who seem to have had contacts to the crown and who in addition to exploiting their holdings engaged in various entrepreneurial activities. The Tattannus are an example of a stratum of Babylonian society that was not affected by the events of 484 BCE. Otherwise Late Achaemenid texts from Borsippa are rare; very few archives can be identified. A small group of Ezida tablets from the reign of Artaxerxes III deserves mention as they are indirectly connected with a similar such group dating later in the Hellenistic period. Also they constitute evidence for the changes in the administration of the Ezida temple that had occurred after the late fifth century BCE (Waerzeggers 2010: p. 10; there is additional material on Ezida from other archives).