The Temple Accounts.
At all times the great temples of Assyria and Babylonia kept extensive accounts of even daily revenue and expenditure. These accounts were most carefully preserved, being written with special care on well selected clay, and have reached us as a rule in exceptionally fine condition. They give us an immense mass of information, largely consisting of dry and disconnected items, but helping to build up knowledge. The French explorations made by De Sarzec at Telloh resulted in the discovery of an enormous number of documents, mostly accounts kept of the daily expenses and revenues of the vast temples there, from the earliest times down to the Dynasty of Ur. One huge find of some 30,000 tablets of the latter period were stolen by Arabs, and have been sold in large quantities to European and American Museums, or to private collectors. Few of them are legal documents, or concerned with other than Temple business, but their contents illustrate the state of society in the times before the First Dynasty of Babylon. They are most important for determining the extent to which the Code of Hammurabi was dependent on, or influenced by, the Sumerian Law of earlier days.
Of those which reached Constantinople, the products of the season of 1894 consisted entirely of tablets of the Dynasty of Ur, and were classified by V. Scheil. The tablets found in 1895 were catalogued by Thureau-Dangin, and are mostly of the Dynasty of Akkad. The finds of 1900 are all of the Dynasty of Ur. These are all now catalogued and largely published in the Inventaire des Tablettes de Tello conservées au Musée Ottoman (Paris, E. Leroux, 1910), by Fr. Thureau-Dangin and H. de Genouillac.
But by far the largest part of the finds came into the hands of dealers, and so into the museums of Europe and America; and these were published sooner. Thus in 1891 some were reproduced by photography in De Sarzec’s Découvertes en Chaldée (Paris, E. Leroux), plate 41. These tablets, preserved in the Louvre, were, however, properly presented by the Sultan. A great many thus acquired were published by Thureau-Dangin as Tablettes chaldéennes inédites in the Revue d’Assyriologie, iv, pp. 69-86 (Paris, E. Leroux, 1897). In the same journal, v, pp. 67-102, 1902, he gave a Notice sur la troisième collection de tablettes, and in 1903 published a Recueil de tablettes chaldéennes (Paris, E. Leroux), which gave improved editions of the above. Other articles appeared in the Revue d’Assyriologie, iii, pp. 118-46 (1895), iv, pp. 13-27 (1897), and in Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions for 1896, by the same writer, pp. 355-61. These works not only made available large numbers of texts, but also gave most important contributions to their understanding.
In 1896 H. V. Hilprecht published three of the tablets in the Imperial Ottoman Museum at Constantinople in his Old Babylonian Inscriptions, part II, nos. 124-6 (Philadelphia, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society).
In Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, etc., in the British Museum, vols. i, iii, v, vii, ix, x (London, British Museum), copied by L. W. King, 1896-1900; Ancient Babylonian Temple Records, copied by W. R. Arnold (New York, Columbia University Press, 1896); Old Babylonian Temple Records, are texts copied and discussed by R. J. Lau (New York, Columbia University Press, 1906); Haverford Library Collection of Cuneiform Tablets or Documents from the Temple Archives of Telloh, part I, 1905; part II, 1909; part III, 1914 (Philadelphia, J. C. Winston Co.), several hundreds of these texts appeared.
G. Reisner, in 1902, published Tempelurkunden aus Telloh (Berlin, W. Spemann), being the collection presented to the Berlin Museum by H. Simon. H. Radau in his Early Babylonian History (New York, 1903), published and discussed a number purchased for the E. A. Hoffmann collections in the New York Metropolitan Museum. T. G. Pinches dealt with Some Case Tablets from Telloh in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1905, pp. 815-29, and, in 1909, published The Amherst Tablets, being an Account of the Babylonian Inscriptions in the Collection of the Right Honourable Lord Amherst of Hackney, at Didlington Hall, Norfolk (London, Quaritch). H. de Genouillac published and discussed some texts of H. Schlumberger’s as Tablettes d’Ur in the Hilprecht Anniversary Volume, pp. 137-41. In 1911 T. G. Pinches dealt with some Tablets from Telloh in Private Collections in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, pp. 1039-62, and St. Langdon gave Some Sumerian Contracts in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, 1911, pp. 205-14. V. Scheil contributed a series of Notes d’épigraphie et d’archéologie assyriennes to the Recueil de Travaux (Paris, E. Bouillon), vol. xvii, 1895, pp. 28-30; xviii (1896), pp. 64-74; xix (1897), pp. 44-64; xx (1898), pp. 55-72, 200-10; xxi (1899), pp. 26-9, 123-6; xxii (1900), pp. 27-39, 78-80, 149-61; xxiii (1901), pp. 18-23; xxiv (1902), pp. 24-9, in which among other priceless records he gave many extracts from the Telloh texts, some entire texts, and much elucidation of the same. Special studies devoted to the subject are: H. de Genouillac’s Textes juridiques de l’époque d’Ur in the Revue d’Assyriologie, 1911, pp. 1-32; H. Deimel’s Studien zu C. T., I, III, V, VII, IX, X, in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, 1911, pp. 328-45; Sátilla, textes juridiques de la seconde dynastie d’Our in Babyloniaca, iii, 1910, pp. 81-132, by F. Pelégaud, and Di-tilla, textes juridiques chaldéens de la seconde dynastie d’Our, by C. H. Virolleaud (Poitiers, A. Boutifard, 1903); Comptabilité chaldéenne, by the same author, same place and publisher, 1903, is a series of valuable essays. G. A. Barton gave A Babylonian Ledger Account of Reeds and Wood in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 1911, pp. 322-7, and in the same journal, 1912, pp. 207-10, another text of the same sort.
Tablets of the same period have been found by the thousand at Jokha, the ancient Umma, for centuries the hereditary foe of Telloh, and at Dréhem, which seems to have been a closely dependent city of the Nippur district. They have already found their way in large numbers to Europe and America.
Tablets from Jokha were first noticed by V. Scheil in his Notes d’épigraphie et d’archéologie assyrienne in Recueil de Travaux, vol. xix, pp. 62-3, 1897, who showed that Jokha was Umma. Fr. Thureau-Dangin in the Revue d’Assyriologie (viii), 1911, pp. 152-8, who deals with Les noms des mois sur les tablettes de Djokha, gives a number of these texts from the time of the Dynasties of Akkad and Ur. St. Langdon has published A tablet from Umma in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1913, pp. 47-52. In contents these are very similar to the tablets from Telloh or Dréhem, and seem to have been often confused with them by the dealers.
St. Langdon published Tablets from the Archives of Dréhem (Paris, Geuthner, 1912); L. Delaporte, Tablettes de Dréhem in Revue d’Assyriologie , 1911, pp. 183-98; P. Dhorme, Tablettes de Dréhem à Jérusalem in same journal, pp. 39-63; H. de Genouillac, Tablettes de Dréhem, publiées avec inventaire et tables. Musée du Louvre (Paris, Geuthner, 1911), and La trouvaille de Dréhem, Étude avec un choix de textes de Constantinople et Bruxelles (Paris, Geuthner, 1911); see also Some Sumerian Contracts, by St. Langdon, in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, 1911, pp. 205-14. A useful summary is Some Published Texts from Dréhem, by I. M. Price, in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 1912, pp. 211-15.
Sumerian Administrative Documents from the Second Dynasty of Ur, from the Temple Archives of Nippur, vol. iii, part i of Series A, Cuneiform Texts, in Publications of the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1910), deals with closely related texts.
E. Huber wrote Die altbabylonischen Darlehenstexte aus der Nippur-Sammlung im K. O. Museum in Konstantinopel as a contribution to the Hilprecht Anniversary Volume, pp. 189-222. V. Scheil in his Notes d’épigraphie made some entries about those Nippur texts which reached Constantinople, see p. [78].
An allied text was given by P. Dhorme in the Journal Asiatique, 1912, pp. 158-9, as Un brouillon d’inventaire.
The whole subject of these Temple Records is being studied by H. Torczyner, who has started with Vorläufige Bemerkungen to Altbabylonische Tempelrechnungen, umschrieben und erklärt in the Anzeiger der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 1910, pp. 136-40.
On the general scope and purpose of the Temple Records, see the article on Babylonian Book-keeping, by A. T. Clay, in the American Journal of Archaeology, 1910, pp. 74 ff.
The very ancient texts from Telloh, usually called Pre-Sargonic, have been issued, beside Thureau-Dangin’s Recueil de Tablettes chaldéennes, by Allotte de la Fuÿe as Documents présargoniques (Paris, E. Leroux, 1908, 1909). Sumerian Tablets in the Harvard Semitic Museum was begun, by Mary Ida Hussey, with part 1 in 1912. Two Tablets of the Period of Lugalanda were published by St. Langdon in Babyloniaca, 1911, pp. 246-7. Much the most useful publication, however, is Tablettes sumériennes archaïques, by H. de Genouillac (Paris, Geuthner, 1909), which gives not only texts, but transcriptions and such translation as is possible, and also an admirable account of all they imply, as to law and custom. A considerable amount of this is strikingly like the later laws. In The Amherst Tablets (London, Quaritch, 1908), T. G. Pinches published a few more. The bulk of them still await publication.
Ancient Bullae and Seals of Shirpurla by N. P. Likhatscheff, published in the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society’s Classical Section IV, pp. 225-63, 1907, written in Russian, gives a number of similar tablets. Oriental Antiquities, by M. V. Nikolsky, in the Oriental Commission of the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society, iii, Series 2, 1908, has over 300 such texts. These appear to belong to the same period.
Some valuable discussions will be found in État des décès survenus dans le personnel de la déesse Bau sous le règne d’Urukagina, by Allotte de la Fuÿe, in the Revue d’Assyriologie, 1910, pp. 139-46.
In his Recueil de Tablettes chaldéennes (Paris, E. Leroux, 1903) Fr. Thureau-Dangin gave as his third series a number of texts of the Sargonic period, dated in the reigns of Shargani-shar-ali and Naram-Sin. A number more are published or described in the Inventaire des tablettes de Tello conservées au Musée Impérial Ottoman, Tome I, by Thureau-Dangin, 1910, and Tome II, by H. de Genouillac, 1911, and several other collections are to be published shortly.
The very early texts from the ancient Shuruppak which have reached the Louvre were published by Thureau-Dangin in his Recueil named above, and in the Revue d’Assyriologie, vi (1904), pp. 143-54, he wrote Contrats archaïques provenant de Shuruppak, with the intention of deciphering and explaining them as far as possible.