Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 75

The textual record from this central town (Jursa 2005b: pp. 110–116) in central Babylonia has played an important role in the history of research on Achaemenid Babylonia owing to the presence of the Murašû archive, probably the single most important source of information on late fifth‐century BCE Babylonia, and certainly the best studied (Stolper 1985; Donbaz and Stolper 1997). Yet the site cannot serve as a paradigm for all of Babylonia owing to the isolated position of the city and to its – relatively speaking – economic “backwardness” during much of the first millennium BCE (Jursa 2010: pp. 405–418).

The tablet groups from Nippur include a fragmentary archive associated with the main temple of the city, Ekur. The archive can be divided into a Late Achaemenid group from the late fifth and the early fourth century and an early group that extends from the late reign of Nebuchadnezzar to the late reign of Darius I and may well belong to the “end‐of‐archives” category even though material dating to the period of the rebellions is still missing. Early Achaemenid private groups include the archive of Bēl‐eṭēri‐Šamaš, an entrepreneur who did business with the Neo‐Babylonian and the Persian administrations (the archive comes to an end in the first year of Cambyses; Jursa 2005a), and a small dossier of business texts originating in the milieu of Carian mercenaries who had been settled in the hinterland of Nippur. The Late Achaemenid period is represented by two private archives: the Murašû archive and the Absummu archive. The latter is a group of more than 50 tablets documenting the activities of the archive holders as temple scribes, administrators, exorcists, and priests working in the Ekur temple. The chronological range extends from the end of the reign of Artaxerxes I to the end of the reign of Artaxerxes II. The Murašû archive of more than 700 tablets, ranging from the tenth year of Artaxerxes I to the first year of Artaxerxes II, is a business archive of a family of entrepreneurs who specialized in agricultural management, working in the hinterland of Nippur in an area that was dotted with the holdings of collectives of soldiers (often of foreign extraction) and large domains of Persian nobles. The archive is an extremely rich source of information on Achaemenid period land tenure and generally on the economic history of the period, as well as on tax and service obligations and the organization of the Babylonian component of the Persian army.