The Old Babylonian loan contract “Aegyptus 10.1”

The Royal Archives from Tell Leilan. Old Babylonian Letters and Treaties from the Lower Town Palace East (PIHANS 117), 2011

The discovery of a comparatively rich and therefore unique body of Old Babylonian political treaty texts made at Tell Leilan in 1987 may justly be described as a surprise. At the time very little in way of similar material had yet been unearthed or published, and it seemed to some doubtful that such material had ever existed in substantial quantity (…).It eventually became apparent that we had the torsos of five large tablets with the texts of political treaties, and that many of the smaller fragments could be matched with these five tablets either as direct or theoretical “joins”. The contracting parties in all five treaties include a king of Leilan, while their partners are kings of neighbouring city-states like Sûmum, Razamā, and Kahat, and in one case the trading city of Assur. (…) The Leilan treaties are all general agreements, i.e. they are not concerned with any distinct or specific affair, but served as projected longterm alliances. The treaties are all unilateral which shows that the treaty process could have included two parallel documents exchanged between the contracting partners. It is further clear that the treaty tablets were not sealed, and therefore would not have been regarded as legal documents per se. These observations, since paralleled by evidence from the Mari archives, pave the way for a basic revaluation of the treaty process in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, and it is this issue as much as the texts themselves which attracts the greatest interest. See also: "General Introduction" in J. Eidem, The Royal Archives from Tell Leilan. Old Babylonian Letters and Treaties from the Lower Town Palace East (PIHANS 117)

Hungarian Assyriological Review, 2020

In this paper a cuneiform economic document from the Egibi archive is investigated. The text is a promissory note from Babylon and was written in an intercalary month in the 6th century B.C. The study discusses how interest in the Babylonian interest-bearing loans worked and how the existence of intercalary months, a peculiarity of the Babylonian calendar, had an effect on this system.

P. Notizia, A. Rositani, L. Verderame (eds.), dNisaba za3-mi2 : Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Francesco Pomponio, dubsar 19, Zaphon: Münster, 181-197., 2021

ĝiš-rin2 sa ak pu2 niĝ2-ĝiri3-a-kam dam-gar3 ku-li-ni-ir lu2 na-an-tuku-tuku "Weighing scales made with a net are a trap made for the feet; A man should not take a merchant for his friend" SP 3.64 (Alster 1997, 92

Bibliotheca orientalis 50 (1993) 425-433

Die Welt des Orients, 2016

This article provides a first edition of an intact Neo-Assyrian estate sale from the final period of the empire in the late seventh century BCE. The publication is not based on the original tablet but on a cast kept at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. At the moment the location of the original tablet is unknown, but it was almost certainly found in modern southeastern Turkey, most likely in the Mardin area, close to the Syrian border. The document uses the standard formulae known from many Neo-Assyrian legal transactions, and the tablet's excellent state, reflected by the cast, makes it exemplary. Moreover, the text adds to our knowledge new, previously unattested personal names, and we also get to know the identities of two high officials (a mayor and a royal delegate) and a chariot driver who all act as witnesses. * We would like to thank Daniel Schwemer, Nils Heeßel and the other participants of the Würzburg Cuneiforum for their suggestions for improvements of our readings of the cast; Tuviah Kwasman, Karen Radner and Enrique Jiménez for reading and commenting a draft of the article; Gerfrid Müller, Michele Cammarosano and Ignaz Hetzel for providing us with a 3D-model of the cast and Gernot Wilhelm and Daniel Schwemer for the permission to publish the cast.

2023

This paper examines some aspects of a group of Sumerian model contracts that record transactions involving slaves, namely antichretic pledges—i.e., the debtor pledged a slave to work for the creditor, instead of paying interest on his loan—and the hiring of slaves as workers. In the Appendix, two of these model contracts are published for the first time; in addition, the reconstructed version of a third model contract is proposed, based on five sources.

Csabai, Zoltán: Antedated Paying of Interest in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods. In: Grüll, Tibor (ed.) Mobility and Transfer : Studies on Ancient Economy. ANEMS 3. Pécs - Budapest, L'Harmattan, 2018, 17-34.

Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 112, 2018

In this article are published eight Old Babylonian legal documents primarily from Isin. Of these texts, now kept in the Hearst Anthropological Museum (Berkeley), four deal with real estate transactions, one with prebendary sales, two with inheritance divisions (one for prebendary shares, one for fields), and one with adoption. These texts, dating from the reigns of Damiq-ilišu, Hammurabi, and Samsu-iluna, add to our still fragmentary knowledge of the social history of Old Babylonian Isin.

There are few documents written in Elamite language from the Old Elamite Period. Nevertheless, there are some 600 hundred legal documents from Susa of the Sukkalmah Period that provide us with direct evidence of Old Elamite social, economic and legal life. The present essay will study two contracts regarding commercial transaction in Old Elamite Susa; special attention is given to the form and content of these documents. A comparison with the nearly contemporary Laws of Hammurabi opens new perspective for comparative study and raises new questions regarding the cultural contact and shared common law between Elam and Mesopotamia. The cuneiform documents show the concern of the creditor who wants to save himself from all the risks involved in a commercial journey by putting the whole responsibly on the traveling merchant. The laws of Hammurabi, however, rule that in the case of enemy attack, i.e., force majeure, the traveling merchant is not to be held responsible. The documents furthermore, shed light on the economic role of the temples.

Texte und Materialien der Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities im Eigentum der Friedrich-Schiller–Universität Jena, 2018

During the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2002–1595 B.C.), the city of Nippur was a primary center for transmission of Sumerian culture, and its scribal schools (called edubba in Sumerian, lit. “the house of the tablets”) had a great reputation throughout the ancient Mesopotamia. The function of the edubba was two-fold: to train the scribes in the skills of their profession, equipping them to record day-to-day affairs, and to preserve and pass on their cultural heritage. In the last phase of early education pupils were trained comprehensively in the formal rethoric of administration and law through compilations of the so-called “model contracts”, together with “model court cases”, legal phrasebooks and collections of legal principles. While they were not functional documents, but simply didactic tools (being stripped of incidental details, such as the list of witnesses and the date), model contracts follow the common patterns of Sumerian contract types and represent a comprehensive assortment of all possible transactions that the ancient Mesopotamian administration might have been required to draw up in the everyday economic life: barley and silver loans; deeds of real estate, field or slave sale; marriage contracts; adoptions, and so on. The book contains the publication of the Sumerian model contracts from Old Babylonian Nippur kept in the Hilprecht Collection, Jena. The edition provides transliterations, translations, commentaries of the entire corpus and of some duplicates kept in other cuneiform collections; the indexes comprise personal names, deities, toponyms and a glossary. Finally, the plates at the end of the volume offer handcopies and photographs of all the HS tablets.

The Royal Archives from Tell Leilan. Old Babylonian Letters and Treaties from the Lower Town Palace East (PIHANS 117), 2011

Preface: This volume is the editio princeps of the Old Babylonian letters and treaties found in 1987 in the “Lower Town Palace East” (Operation 3) at Tell Leilan in northeastern Syria. These tablets, with a few possible exceptions, formed parts of archives belonging to the kings Mutija and Till-Abnû, who reigned at Leilan ca. 1755-45 B.C. (middle chronology). Most of the letters and treaties were found mixed with hundreds of administrative records in the same two small rooms of the palace. Convergent archaeological and archival evidence indicates that this “archive” is a composite group of texts, formed in antiquity through a process of selection and deselection of older and partly redundant documents. Historical Background: Recent publications on both archaeological and documentary evidence from Tell Leilan itself and from other sites have produced detailed discussions of the site and its place in the history of Northern Mesopotamia in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium B.C., so that a few remarks on the historical background for the material presented here will suffice.