Tracing Regime Change during the Transition from the Neo-Babylonian to the Achaemenid Empire at Nippur: Reconstruction of Archives Excavated in 1889
From Firenze University Press Journal: Asia Anteriore Antica (AsiAnA)
Bernhard Schneider, UKSW Warsaw
This article deals with the transition from the Neo-Babylonian to the Achaemenid period at Nippur, more precisely with the evidence covering the end of the reign of Nabonidus in the autumn of 539 BC and continuing into the Early Achaemenid period. Through a combination of material and written evidence from the Northwestern part of “Tablet Hill” (Mound V)2 it is the aim of the paper to put the available information into its proper historical position. Only rarely, one gets a glimpse through archaeology of the everyday life (and death) of those who profited by the new possibilities. The opportunity presented here is an unlikely one. As is known also for other sites the early excavations of Nippur have the nimbus of being badly excavated and documented, or that, besides the physically preserved tablets, its results are entirely lost to science. It will be shown that some information can yet be gained from the unpublished archaeological documentation. In the historical standard work of the period by Pierre Briant (2002: 71–72) as the seeming proof of a smooth transition from Nabonidus to Cyrus serves, for example, the private cuneiform archive of the Egibi family in Babylon. This archive ran without interruption from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC) until early in the reign of Xerxes (486–465 BC). Too often historians accepted the narrative provided by the seemingly ‘native’ chronicles and uncritically adopted the ‘fact’ that the inhabitants of Babylonia received the new overlords with open arms.
It is more than likely that these sources were politically influenced (Waerzeggers 2015b). As Caroline Waerzeggers has pointed out elsewhere, it was still one of the biggest turning points in ancient Mesopotamian his-tory (Waerzeggers 2015a: 181–222). The vast Achaemenid Empire stretched from ‘the Saca who are beyond Sogdi-ana, from there as far as Kush, from the Indus as far as Sardis’ (Darius, Apadana foundation tablets) (Waerzeggers 2015a: 185). This gave an opportunity to at least some Babylonians to take part in longer distance business activ-ities ( Jursa 2010: 224–225) and to profit from a participation in the land-for-service system, as for Nippur most prominently exemplified by the later Murašû archive, 454–404 BC (Stolper 1985; Jursa 2005: 113–114). It is sug-gested here that there might have been some upheavals among the high-ranking officials in the course of the tran-sition of 539 BC which, so far, have been overlooked or were underemphasized. The article tries to provide a local perspective for Nippur which properly highlights the existing documentation from this transition.
HISTORY OF EXCAVATIONS AT NIPPUR UNTIL 1889
More than 130 years have passed since the beginning of intensive excavations at Nippur in 1889, without even counting the short explorations around 1850. Therefore, it is necessary to start with an introduction including the history of research as well as on the archival material from the excavations.After the early explorations by Rawlinson, Layard and Loftus around the 1850ies (Rawlinson 1849/50; Layard 1853; Loftus 1856), only few antiquities from Nippur appeared on the antiquities market until attention was direct-ed to the site again by the so-called “Wolfes Expedition to Babylonia” in 1884/85 (Hilprecht 1903: 290–293). It was a survey conducted by members of the American Oriental Society, connected to the American Institute of Archae-ology, in order to choose a valuable site for excavations and to arouse such public interest through follow-up lectures that an American institution would be able to finance such excavations (Hilprecht 1903: 292–293). The expedition was led by William H. Ward and accompanied by John Henry Haynes as photographer, the later Nippur field direc-tor. More and more objects kept coming on the antiquities market until 1888 (Hilprecht 1908: 201–204) and it was around this time that Nippur tablets arrived in different collections (Ibid.). During the first campaign led by J. P. Peters, excavations in the Southeastern part of Nippur on Mound V, the triangular mound which became known as ‘Tablet Hill’, were started on 12th February 1889 (Peters 1897: 245–246; Clayden 2016: 1). Following Peter’s Journal entry ‘work was stopped suddenly’ a bit more than two months later on 15th April ‘on account of the shooting by a ‘zaptiyeh’ (i. e. a gendarme of the Ottoman Empire) of a thieving Arab of the Es-Seid tribe’ in the aftermath of which the camp was set on fire by local Arabs (Peters 1897a). That already during the first campaign finds were stolen (Hilprecht 1908: 279), part of which probably originally were unearthed from ‘Tablet Hill’ can be better under-stood from the following excerpt of Peters’ Journal (p. 184–185) entry of 15th April 1889, (Westenholz 2020):
Since my return [i. e. since 5th of April] there has been a find of stolen objects, but from what trench we cannot ascertain. One of them was a stamp for bricks, bearing the name of Naram Sin, & the city of Nippur; another was a stone tablet, astronomical, with archaic characters. Several were unbaked tablets of the Hammurabi dynasty, & the remainder small unbaked tablets of the late Babylonian or Persian period. There were 14 objects in all. (Westenholz 2020).
That means already at this time some objects might have reached the antiquities market directly from the exca-vation trenches. To illustrate how fast antiquities found their way into different collections via the antiquities mar-ket may serve the following example from the third campaign led by John H. Haynes. After the excavation of the main part of the Murašû archive at Nippur during the third campaign led by J. H. Haynes from 27th May until 7thJune 1893, already in 1894, a few tablets arrived at London which went through the hands of antiquities dealers in Baghdad and finally reached the collection of the British Museum in 1896 as well as several other final destinations (Stolper 1985, 11; Jursa 2005: 113).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/asiana-1576
Read Full Text: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/asiana/article/view/1576
