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The Late Babylonian library texts are an important testament of the vigor of Babylonian cultural life under foreign occupation. However, they have not yet been analyzed comprehensively as a group. Library texts are normally undated. If, as happens frequently, colophons naming identifiable scribes, a meaningful archeological context, or a connection with dated archival texts are also missing, dating depends on the evaluation of epigraphy and tablet formats. Owing to a lack of pertinent research, it is currently possible only to distinguish a broad category of ‘late’ texts dating roughly to the late fifth through second centuries from tablets originating in the late seventh, the sixth, and perhaps also the early fifth centuries: distinguishing Late Achaemenid from Seleucid period literary tablets is often impossible. With this general uncertainty in mind, the following major “libraries” can be assigned roughly to the Achaemenid period.

From Uruk comes the library of the Eanna temple, 400‐plus texts and fragments, having a chronological range (on the basis of archeological context and accompanying administrative texts) from the Neo‐Babylonian period to the second year of Xerxes (Pedersén 1998: p. 206; Clancier 2009: pp. 34–35; other, later temple libraries from Uruk include no, or nearly no, Late Achaemenid material and date exclusively to the Seleucid period). Two libraries of families of exorcists have been recovered in a private house, one dating to roughly 445–385 BCE, the other from the second half of the fourth to the end of the third century (Clancier 2009: pp. 58–61). The texts include predominantly magical, medical, and divinatory material, as well as school texts and some mathematical compositions (Clancier 2009: pp. 81–82).

From Babylon, we have a large group of literary texts of all descriptions that can be associated with the Esangila temple. The texts include a vast group of astronomical texts, perhaps as many as 3000 (see, e.g., Ossendrijver 2012), as well as divinatory, magical, and some medical material, other learned compositions, viz., mathematical and lexical texts, commentaries and school texts, and finally a few historical and historical‐literary compositions (Clancier 2009: pp. 205–212). The chronological distribution of the dateable astronomical material suggests, however, that the bulk of this library is post‐Achaemenid (Clancier 2009: pp. 309–311). Among the astronomical texts, the Astronomical Diaries deserve special notice. These mostly post‐Achaemenid texts are records of astronomical observations accompanied by price data, information on the water level of the Euphrates, and occasional notes on remarkable incidents of political, economic, or social nature and/or of ominous portent (e.g. Pirngruber 2012).

The excavated material from Babylon (Pedersén 2005) consists predominantly of archival texts, as detailed above, but some literary material was recovered too (Clancier 2009: pp. 147–149). According to the information given by Pedersén, this material is mostly Neo‐Babylonian or in any case predates the reign of Xerxes (see also Baker 2008). This is true for finds on the Kasr (Pedersén 2005: pp. 185–186) and on Išin Aswad (ibid. 247–272), as well as for the “libraries” found in the Ištar temple (ibid. 188–192) and in the Ninurta temple (ibid. 232⁵). Numerous hitherto unpublished tablets without a clear archeological and archival context cannot be dated.

In the Ebabbar temple in Sippar, a large collection of literary and scholarly tablets was recovered by Iraqi excavators in the 1980s (Pedersén 1998: pp. 194–197). The library contains omen collections, prayers, incantations, and hymns, as well as copies of some of the most important myths and epics of Mesopotamian literature. Several scribes mentioned in the colophons of these texts can be identified with priests known from the administrative Ebabbar archive (Fadhil and Hilgert 2008; Schaudig 2009); the library is thus to be dated to the (later) Neo‐Babylonian and Early Achaemenid period, 484 BCE being the terminus ante or ad quem for its deposition.