CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE BABYLONIAN
ECONOMY IN THE FIRST
MILLENNIUM BC
Michael Jursa
SOURCEST
he first millennium BCis one of the best documented periods of Mesopotamian
history. Both archaeological remains and textual sources are available in abundance,
but their diachronic distribution is uneven.^1 The first two centuries are only very
scarcely documented and contemporary texts are rare. Assyrian sources and later
chronicles suggest that this was a period of unrest, collapse of central authority and
general economic decline. The eighth and especially the seventh century have yielded
slightly richer documentation, for instance an eighth-century letter archive from
central Babylonian Nippur (Cole 1996 ). This is also the period at the end of which
a gradual increase both of the number and the size of settlements first becomes
perceptible in the archaeological record. From about 700 BConwards, demographic
growth and increasing urbanisation are the decisive economic trends, especially for
northern Babylonia, well into the Sassanian period. At the culmination of this
development, in the first centuries AD, probably the entire agriculturally usable area
of the southern alluvium had been taken under the plough.
However, this development, suggested primarily by one large-scale archaeological
survey (Adams 1981 ), might not be quite so continuous and unidirectional as has
been suggested. Temporary and locally limited discontinuities, even reversals of the
general trend, may have occurred. In the absence of additional survey data, the textual
sources must be sifted for pertinent evidence. This is possible primarily during the
sixth and fifth centuries from which tens of thousands of tablets are known. From
the fourth century onwards, and especially after the Macedonian conquest, not only
is a gradual decline in the number of tablets found noticeable; increasingly fewer
subjects were treated in these texts as well. This is owed to the gradual rise of Aramaic
- written on perishable materials – and partly also of Greek as the official language
of the Macedonian and Seleucid administrations.
In addition to the uneven diachronic distribution of the textual sources, another
limitation has to be mentioned: of the two traditional institutional agents of the
Mesopotamian economy, the household(s) of the ruler and the temples, only the latter