silver could be invested in loans for consumptive purposes (issued to fishermen and
herdsmen who could not fulfil their quota) and for commercial purposes.
The three major Old Babylonian archives from Larsa itself, the archive of
Balmunamhe, the one of Shep-Sîn and the letter archive of Shamash-hazir and Sîn-
iddinam, all date from the period of domination by Hammurabi and Samsuiluna.
Apart from the fact that dues were redirected to the palace in Babylon and a definite
increase in scale, they exhibit much continuity with the previous period.
It is still not clear how far the activities of Balmunamhe, the most famous inhabitant
of the area of large residences excavated in Larsa, extended (the cuneiform tablets
were excavated illicitly before the official French excavations started). This businessman
was involved in slave purchases and real estate transactions. A village from which
revenues was extracted was named after him, just as another village was named after
his father. A study by Dyckhoff ( 1998 ) situates the activities of Balmunamhe in the
management of the Enki temple of Larsa. However, the barley revenues of his village
(or rather, the agricultural district under his supervision) and the one of his father
were brought to the central storehouse of Larsa. This reconstruction confirms and
illustrates how the palace used the existing structures – in the south, the temple
households – to control the local economy and extract its surpluses.
The archive of Shep-Sîn consists of two files. On the one hand, the file of mainly
loan documents dating from before and after Shep-Sîn’s official function as Overseer
of the Merchants in Larsa, forms his private archive. Another file, consisting of
administrative texts dated between Hammurabi 36 and Hammurabi 42 , documents
the responsibilities of Shep-Sîn as overseer of the merchants. These official documents
must have been kept in his private archive, a practice not uncommon in Babylonia.
In his function as Overseer of the Merchants, Shep-Sîn was responsible for the retail
of dates from the palace orchards around Larsa. The merchants selling the dates owed
an amount of silver to the palace equivalent to one-third of the value of the dates,
to be collected and delivered to (the delegate of) the palace in Babylon by Shep-Sîn.
Accordingly, the merchants had a profit margin of two-thirds of the value of the
dates. The retail of fish from the palace marshes also fell under Shep-Sîn’s responsibility.
The correspondence of Hammurabi with Shamash-hazir and Sîn-iddinam concerns
the managment of royal land in the province of Larsa after Hammurabi’s conquest
of the region. Since this is our main source for the practice of assigning subsistence
plots, it will be discussed below.
NORTHERN BABYLONIAUr III control over the northern part of Babylonia and the Diyala region seems to
have been largely restricted to the extraction of tribute. Since no archives from Ur
III ‘great organizations’ have been recovered, continuity cannot be detected. After
the downfall of the Ur III kingdom, the local palaces could not fall back on temples
or other households with a well established economic basis, as in the south.
Political developmentsIn the Diyala-region, written (though largely unpublished) documentation continues
after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Already at the beginning of Ibbi-Sîn’s reign,
— Anne Goddeeris —