The Sacred Bureaucracy of Neo-Babylonian Temples

My paper will be dedicated to the flows we can observe between the temples and the Old Babylonian practice documents. It will issue a list of legal and administrative documents indicating in one way or another an activity related to the temple. An attempt will be made to discern this activity and understand its nature. This activity is in general economic, social or religious, but we will try to classify it in the private or the public sphere. The idea is to better understand the role of state institutions considered as public and the role of persons acting on their private account. By focusing on their relationship with the temples, we introduce in the equation "private and state" the data "temple" in order to improve our understanding of the Old Babylonian society.

2014

Zaphon, 2018

The book focuses on the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters dated to Nabopolassar and the first half of Nebuchadnezzar’s reigns (ca. 626–580 BCE); this is the formative phase of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The 215 letters in the corpus come from the two major Neo-Babylonian temple archives known today: Eanna, temple of Ištar, in Uruk (190 letters), and Ebabbar, temple of the son god Šamaš, in Sippar (25 letters). Two letters from Babylon are additionally included as appendices A and B (one of which is of the still crown prince Nebuchadnezzar from the battlefield at Harran). In many ways, these letters are the closest we get to the erratic drama which was day-to-day life in Babylonia at the mid first millennium BCE. The letters were a vital administrative tool, necessary for the ongoing functioning of these institutions. As such, they provide first-hand testimony for the tasks and obstacles that the Neo-Babylonian bureaucrats faced. As of yet, no systematic attempt has been made to date and contextualise the Neo-Babylonian administrative letters and they have never been studied as a group, and they are still one of the most underrepresented and underexploited source material in Neo-Babylonian studies. This is due to the lack of up-to-date editions, the “elusive nature” of epistolography (namely the difficulty in accurately dating and contextualising the letters), as well as the unique philological difficulties of the texts. Thus three interdependent goals stand at the base of this study: 1. Establishing new, up-to-date editions of the early Neo-Babylonian letters from Eanna and Ebabbar 2. Studying these letters as a distinct text group 3. Contextualising the letters The first part of this work, chapters 2–6, analyses the letters as a distinct text group with its own characteristics. The letters are examined both as a source for their authors’ sense of identity and mentality, as well as for the structure and administrative setting in which these authors were active. Following the introduction (chapter 1), which lays out the historical and scholarly basis for this study, chapter two examines the formal aspect of epistolography (e.g., structure and stock phrases). It then discuss two main methodological issues: the rhetorical analysis of the letters, and the problem of dating. In chapter three I discuss the “non-content” aspects of epistolography: viz. the language, the tablets themselves, and the logistics involved in epistolographic activity. At the core of the discussion chapters (2–6) stands chapter four, in which I examine aspects of officialdom in the temples. Following a discussion on the concepts of (good) service (maṣṣartu) and “administrative sin” (ḫīṭu), I go on to focus on the different interactions as revealed in the letters. Here, the slightly different administrative structure of the two temples, as well as substantial difference in their size, requires the distinction between Eanna and Ebabbar (the former naturally takes most of the focus). Starting with the inner interaction of temple officials with their colleagues within the same institution, the discussion then zooms out to examine the interaction of temple officials with other temples and state’s institutions. Chapter five surveys the main subject matters discussed in the letters, highlighting the contribution of the epistolographic perspective to the study of the temples’ day-to-day operation. In the sixth and concluding chapter of the discussion, a diachronic perspective is introduced, and the early Neo-Babylonian letter corpus is compared to the earlier Neo-Assyrian letters from the State Archive of Assyria (SAA), and to the later epistolographic material from the second half of the long sixth century (late Nabonidus and Achaemenid letters). The second part of the book, chapter seven, presents up-to-date editions of the 215 letters in the corpus. These include translation, transliteration, and contextual and philological commentary. Close attention is given to the contextualization of the letters; vis-à-vis dates, prosopography, and administrative and historical settings.

Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2019

This article offers an overview of the early Babylonian priesthood, as it was organized and operated during the third millennium BCE. It is emphasized that the priests and priestesses proper, i.e., individuals who were specifically concerned with cultic matters, represented a relatively small segment of the employees of temple households. Much more numerous within these institutions (which might more appropriately be termed "temple communities") were the individuals whose roles were of either administrative or economic character. Focusing on the administrators of temple households, and identifying them as "Managerial Class," the article argues that, during Pre-Sargonic times, this social group wielded great economic and political power, which at times even exceeded that of the emerging secular leaders (such as ensiks and lugals). To demonstrate this point, an interaction between these two competing centers of powers (particularly in the city-state of Lagaš) is studied in detail. In memory of Itamar Singer Keywords temple household-palace-early Sumerian kingship-managerial class-Sanga-Ensik-Lugal-purification priests-Lu A List-Nam-šita

The study of economy and religion in Babylonia during the first millennium bc is primarily that of two well-documented temples, the Eanna temple of the city of Uruk and the Ebabbar of Sippar. The administrative archives of those temples – consisting of tens of thousands of cuneiform texts – allow us to understand parts of the temple economy in great detail, while at the same time this abundance of material frustrates traditional approaches to Babylonian religion. This essay aims in general to emphasize that Babylonian temples were large-scale, multifaceted religious institutions. Capitalizing on recent advancements in our technical understanding of the temple economy, it integrates these advancements into issues of broader religious, historical, intellectual, and economic significance. In particular, it stresses three points: first, the temples’ amalgamated ruling structure fostered institutional permanence and should therefore be understood as a challenge to the ‘temple-as-household’ metaphor; second, large-scale centralization of wealth in the temples was necessary for advancements in Babylonian learned culture (especially in astronomy and mathematics); and, finally, the centralization of manpower in the temples gave them particular advantages in the politics of the first millennium bc. In the end, I argue that all of these are in fact manifestations of Babylonian religion in themselves.

in: K. Kaniut, A. Löhnert, J. L. Miller, A. Otto, M. Roaf, W. Sallaberger (Hrsg.), Tempel im Alten Orient. 7. Internationales Colloquium der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 11.-13. Oktober 2009, Wiesbaden 2013, 167-178.

In diesem Aufsatz werden neue Erkenntnisse zur Rolle der babylonischen Tempel in der Mitte des ersten Jahrtausends v. Chr. zusammengefasst. Der fehlerlose Ablauf des Kultgeschehens war nach babylonischer Vorstellung eine Voraussetzung für die Prosperität des Landes, aber die Tempel waren weitaus mehr als nur kultische Institutionen; sie waren Teil der staatlichen Verwaltung. Die Krone nutzte die Struktur der Tempel zur lokalen Verwaltung und zur Durchführung von Dienstleistungen. Die Tempel verfügten über umfangreiche Produktionsmittel, aber waren im ersten Jahrtausend keine dominanten Akteure im Wirtschaftsraum. In einigen Bereichen war die Tempelwirtschaft sogar unprofitabel. In den Bereichen jedoch, auf die sich ihre Produktion spezialisierte, waren sie erfolgreich, nämlich in der Viehwirtschaft im Falle des Eanna-Tempels und im Dattelanbau im Falle des sipparäischen Ebabbar. Die Tempel bildeten Kristallisationspunkte lokalen Stolzes für die Bevölkerung. Der König versuchte, durch die Einsetzung von königlichen Beamten im Tempel eine Destabilisierung des Landes aufgrund einer möglichen Akkumulation von Macht in den Händen lokaler Eliten zu vermeiden.

Palace and temple have always been subject to scholarly interest. The first represents the political power of any given land or country, while the latter serves as an entry point into the marvelous world of the religious organization of any given culture. Though studying these separate institutions on their own is of great importance, it is even more in teresting to study the area in which the interests of both institutions meet. Such studies can show how both parties have to deal with each other's interest and have to adapt their own to guarantee a fruitful cooperation. This thesis consists of such a study, researching the relationship between the Babylonian palace and temple in the context of the daily offerings while focusing on the specific role of the king and his priests. With this study I hope to fill in the blanks that are present in this field of study, since this relation has been examined, but not in the context with which this thesis is concerned.

This paper investigates the royal court in Babylon as well as the role of Assyrian officials active in Babylonia during the period of Assyrian domination. Although many offices at the Neo-Babylonian court are attested for the first time already during the Neo-Assyrian period (Jursa 2010), the Babylonian court of this period has not yet been studied in detail. This study examines these officials, beginning with the reign of Tiglath-pileser III, the first Neo-Assyrian sovereign to exercise direct kingship over Babylonia. During the following century we witness for the first time direct rule over Babylonia exercised by Assyrian princes acting on behalf of the king, and one of the main questions of this study is how this new situation affected the development of the local court in Babylon. I address this issue first by examining the functions of the Assyrian court officials active in Babylonia, and then by comparing their tasks with those of their counterparts in Assyria. For this task I rely especially on the state correspondence and on some Babylonian documents (the kudurrus). It is clear from studying the Babylonian court representatives that they were more involved in state affairs and military operations than their counterparts in the north, and it seems that this situation also had an effect on the function and rank of some court officials working in the Assyrian homeland, including the post-canonical eponyms.