Istanbul Murasu Texts.

• Author: Dandamayev, M.
• Position: Review

By VEYSEL DONBAZ and MATTHEW W. STOLPER. Publications de l'Institut historique-archeologique neerlandais de Stamboul, vol. 79. Leiden: NEDERLANDS HISTORISCH-ARCHAEOLOGISCH INSTITUUT TE ISTANBUL, 1997. Pp. xiv + 215, illus.

This volume contains 110 cuneiform tablets from the Murasu archives, discovered in a single room during excavations at Nippur in 1893. The find consisted of about 870 documents and fragments that subsequently were distributed among museum collections in Philadelphia, Istanbul, and Jena. The first Murasu texts were published by H. V. Hilprecht and A. T. Clay (Business Documents of Murashu Sons of Nippur, Dated in the Reign of Artaxerxes I [464-424 B.C.], The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, series A, vol. 9 [Philadelphia: Department of Archaeology and Paleontology, 1898]), and the book under review presents all the unpublished texts currently in the Istanbul collection. Thus, the entire material of the archive is now available, except four documents in the Nies Babylonian Collection at Yale University that cannot now be traced to the above-mentioned finds and whose provenance remains unknown. The texts had been drafted in Nippur and other regions during the second half of the fifth century B.C. when land around Nippur was parceled out to Persian nobles and groups of soldiers and officials who, in turn, rented some of their fields and date groves to the Murasu firm.

In an introduction the editors describe the texts that are subsequently presented in autographs and transliterations and to which comments are appended. Translations are given only for exceptional passages. The book also contains additions and corrections to previously published Murasu tablets in the Istanbul collection, and information on the seal impressions. There are also indices of personal, place, and divine names as well as a list of professional and official titles. (A reference to "Claudia Wunsch" on p. 13, n. 29 should be corrected to "Cornelia Wunsch.")

Here are comments to a few documents. According to no. 3, in 430, a date grove on the Euphrates-of-Nippur Canal was rented for thirty years to the Murasus for fifty kur of dates a year, with the entire rent of 2,273 hectoliters of dates paid in advance. It seems more likely to me that payment was in silver equivalent, not in dates. The land belonged to Halaba-Esu, son of Padi-Esu, and to Halaba-Esu, son of Mukkesu, who apparently were Egyptians, and it bordered on a plot...