Temple Benefices of Borsippean Families

On the basis of about 2000 hitherto unpublished Babylonian cuneiform tablets, the project will reconstruct the economic and social life of the upper stratum of the urban population in the ancient city of Borsippa in the seventh and sixth century B.C. The focus will lie on the interaction between this upper class of citizens and the sanctuaries of Borsippa, in which these people performed various cultic duties. These service obligations have far-reaching economic and social implications. The rights to income deriving from such service - prebends - were of major economic importance for these people, and ownership of prebends was an important factor for constituting social identity and position. The project will investigate both the organisation of the cult and the cultic services, emphasising quantification wherever possible, and the way the prerequisites of this system influenced the families of prebendaries regarding their marriage and inheritance practices as well as their economic choices. One of the most important new aspects concerns the role of women in the cult, which was more active than hitherto assumed. Overall it will be possible to define and explain the make-up of the economic mentality of this stratum of Babylonian society. The project will serve as an important case study and a source of comparison for general ancient and economic history, since the institutions investigated appear in structurally similar form whereever in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world urban communities chose a temple as their economic and social centre. But nowhere are the sources so rich in economic and social detail as in the corpus from Borsippa.

Working in close collaboration with M. Jursa`s START Project The Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (FWF-project Y-180), the project Temple Benefices of Borsippean Families studied one important aspect of the society and economy of Babylonia in the first millennium BC on the basis of about two thousand hitherto unpublished cuneiform documents. The project`s specific aim was a monographic study of the temple cult and cult practice in the city of Borsippa, in the vicinity of Babylon, in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the period from which the tablets originate. The subjects studied include: the pantheon venerated in Borsippa - among these gods, there are several which were hitherto nearly unknown -, the internal organization and functioning of the city`s main temple, Ezida - the organization of space, the rules governing the right of access to various parts of the temple, and so forth -, the sacrificial cult and the cultic calendar - the terminology of the offerings, their composition and their periodicity -, and the prebendary system, i.e. the system of income rights granted by the temple to certain individuals or families who fulfilled specific tasks in the cult - here the nexus tying economy, society and religion closely together becomes very apparent. Finally, the way state taxation is bound to the temple economy is shown in a new light by the Borsippa material: holders of certain temple offices were liable to be taxed on the grounds of precisely these offices.