DigEanna: a Digital Reconstruction of the Eanna Archive

The project offers the first comprehensive study of an archive of about 10.000 Babylonian cuneiform tablets that belong to the temple of the goddess Ishtar in the city of Uruk in todays southern Iraq. The texts date to the sixth century BCE and range from short notes over letters to long lists of temple property and complex legal documents. Their protagonists are equally diverse and reflect the full range of Babylonian society of the day: from slaves over other types of forced labourers to free craftsmen, priests, administrators, royal officials, and even the king. This archive is one of the most complex bodies of textual data from antiquity. It gives an insight into all aspects of daily life in this temple household: we can reconstruct wage levels and standards of living, we know about craft production and the complexities of material culture, we read about day-to- day cultic practice as well as about large feasts. The texts also document the various possessions associated with the temple household: fields, gardens, houses, and not least the vast and sprawling temple complex itself, with its religious buildings (in the centre of which the statue of Ishtar was kept in Babylonian understanding, the mistress residing in her home), its workshops, storehouses and massive walls. All facets of the management of this complex institution, as an economic entity, a religious institution and, importantly, as a seat of local power that was brought increasingly under royal control, are reflected in the archive. We see the micro-level of quotidian practice, through the vast bulk of descriptive records, as well as the level of procedures and decision-making that determines general temple politics, through a series of exceptional legal documents and juridical protocols that show the temple community in interaction with the king and the royal establishment. The project will catalog the entire data that are available and make them available in an on-line database. It will also reconstruct the administrative structure of the temple household, its bureaucratic system, by identifying the various bureaus and scribal offices that produced the distinct files and dossiers into which the texts can be sorted. It is the first time that such a large group of written records from ancient Mesopotamia is being subjected to such a comprehensive and thorough analysis; in fact, there are very few comparable cases from all of Antiquity. Thus, the project offers not only a contribution to the political and socio-economic history of ancient Mesopotamia. It also breaks new ground in the history of bureaucracy. The project leaders are professors Johannes Hackl (Univ. of Jena), Michael Jursa (Univ. of Vienna, coordinator), and Malgorzata Sandowicz (Univ. of Warsaw). They are specialists in Ancient Near Eastern studies and can draw on a wide network of collaborating colleagues and institutions, including, i.a., the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and Yale University.