Anne Goddeeris Libri

During the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900–1700 BC), Nippur, the religious capital of Babylonia, was a center of cultural and economic activities. Excavations have yielded, beside numerous literary compositions, a variety of documents concerning urban and temple administration as well as economic activities and property management of the priestly families. The book contains the publication of the legal and administrative documents from Old Babylonian Nippur kept in the Hilprecht Collection, Jena. The edition provides transliterations, translations, commentaries, hand copies, and photographs (on CD-ROM) of all texts. The indexes comprise personal names, toponyms, professions, deities, year-names, and a glossary. A separate chapter by Ursula Seidl discusses the iconography of seal impressions on the tablets. The legal documents are keystones of the family archives excavated by the Babylonian Expedition. The book also includes a discussion of the activities related in these archives and of the families who kept them. The administrative documents predominantly belong to a single archive and are characterized by an unusual dating system. The archive keeps track of sections of the management of the city and its temples.

The book contains 260 previously unpublished cuneiform documents from the early Old Babylonian town of Kisurra (ca. 1923–1866 BC) now kept in the collections of the British Museum. Although they have been acquired on the antique market, their provenience could be ascertained on the basis of intrinsic and formal criteria. In Kisurra, a small city state in central Babylonia, periods of independency under local kings have alternated with episodes of foreign rule by Uruk, Isin, Larsa and Babylon. The documents concern different aspects of agricultural management, ranging from the administration of the barley produce over silver and barley loans to contracts concerning real estate transfers through sale, inheritance and bequest. The documents are published in hand-copy, transliteration and commented translation. The volume includes extensive indices of the personal and divine names and an annotated list of all the year-names occurring in the Kisurra texts (taking into account all the published documents from Old Babylonian Kisurra).