Volume 7, Issue 1

Although the archaic lists are of the utmost importance, as they mark the beginning of the 3,000-year lexical tradition in ancient Mesopotamia, their function is largely unresolved. This contribution suggests that a key to their understanding can be found in the context of a transforming and expanding writing system that is still rooted in administrative practices. The success of the new bureaucratic notation system leads to an expansion of its administrative use, which in turn leads to a demand for more signs and sign combinations. The lexical corpus is the result of a systematic push of the proto-cuneiform frontier —i. e. the range of what can be expressed through proto-cuneiform signs. The lists thus offer a range of exploratory signs that can be implemented for administrative purposes and also have the potential to go beyond bureaucracy. In addition, they exemplify the rules underlying the systematic exploration of the potential of (proto-)cuneiform, thus contributing to the further transformation of the writing system.

The article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unfree humans among the political-cultic elite in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf during the Early Dynastic IIIb period, ca. 2475–2300 BCE. The analysis of the written data from the Adab city-state demonstrates that the royal house used the unfree as gifts to maintain a sociopolitical network on three spatial levels – the internal, local, and (inter)regional. The gift-givers and gift-receivers were mostly male adult members of the local and foreign elite, whereas the dislocated unfree humans were heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and the ways they lost their freedom. The author relates the social profiles of both groups to the logistics of human traffic to reveal the link between social status and forms and nature of spatial mobility in the politically and socially unstable Early Dynastic Near East.

The paper examines the cuneiform evidence from sixth-century Babylonia (and beyond) for information on the form and aims of Neo-Babylonian imperial rule over its western provinces. While new texts, which hitherto have not been considered in this context, can be brought to bear on the issue, direct evidence from these provinces is still scarce. These documents will thus be supplemented by drawing on the rich information concerning state institutions and resource extraction in the imperial centre. It is argued that in the first half of the Neo-Babylonian period, until ca. 585 BCE, Babylonian imperial rule in the western periphery can be conceptualized primarily as a straightforward exploitative tributary regime. From about the mid-reign of Nebuchadnezzar onwards, however, there is a shift towards a more sustainable resource extraction through the creation of stable pockets of Babylonian presence in the periphery. This diachronic shift was meant to steady and organize the initial ad hoc Babylonian approach. These measures, however, did not prevail, and the chaotic years which followed the 43 years reign of Nebuchadnezzar illustrate the fragility of the relatively short-lived Babylonian imperial age.