CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE EGIBI FAMILY
Cornelia Wunsch
T
he records of the Egibi family constitute the largest and most important private
archive from the Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid periods (sixth and early
fifth centuries BC). Local people hoping to find antiquities to sell discovered the
tablets in the 1870 s and 1880 s among the ruins of private houses in the Babylon
area. They were found in sealed earthen jars, a sure sign that they had been consciously
set aside by their owners. The archive is said to have originally comprised some three
to four thousand tablets, but the rough handling during excavation, shipment, and
trade inevitably reduced their number. George Smith acquired the bulk of this archive
for the British Museum in 1876 , the rest was dispersed among many collections in
Europe and America. Today about 1 , 700 texts can be confidently attributed to this
archive, discounting duplicates and joined fragments.
The records cover five generations of members of one family (a sequence of first-
born sons) over more than 100 years, from the time of Nebuchadrezzar II until the
beginning of Xerxes’ reign. Late nineteenth-century scholars described the family as
‘bankers of Jewish origin’; this reflected contemporary ideas about Jews and their role
in banking rather than actual fact. These labels are still in use today even though
the notions both of ‘bankers’ and the allegedly Jewish ethnicity of the Egibis were
shown to be inappropriate many decades ago. The family name Egibi is of
straightforward Sumero-Babylonian origin,^1 and the business activities of the branch
that left the famous archive fit the description of entrepreneurshiprather than deposit
banking.^2
There is no sign that the first generation of our family branch owned or inherited
any real estate or prebendary offices. The latter were the insignia of the traditional
wealthy urban class and guaranteed participation in the stream of income from local
temples. M. Jursa ( 2005 : 66 ) described the Egibi as ‘members of a socially mobile
class of entrepreneurially oriented urbanites without well-established roots in the
traditional establishment whose focal point was formed by the old sanctuaries’.
The documents of the first generation were drawn up for Sˇulaja, the son of (Nabû)-
ze ̄ra-ukı ̄n. Most of them concern wholesale trade in commodities (barley and dates)
in the rural districts around Babylon. For this end, Sˇulaja engaged in long-term
business ventures with several partners, sharing profits and risks, and built up capital
as well as connections, later to be developed by his son Nabû-ah
̆
h
̆e ̄-iddin.