Business and Politics under the Persian Empire: The Financial Dealings of Marduk-nasir-apli of the House of Egibi (521-487 B.C.E.).

• Author: Da Riva, R.
• Position: Book review

Business and Politics under the Persian Empire: The Financial Dealings of Marduk-nasir-apli of the House of Egibi (521-487 B.C.E.). By KATHLEEN ABRAHAM. Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 2004. Pp. xxvi + 560. $60.

In this book Kathleen Abraham analyzes the institutional connections of Marduk-nasir-apli (hereafter MNA), son of Itti-Marduk-balatu, a Babylonian Egibi of the fourth generation, by relying on both published and unpublished economic texts pertaining to his archive. The aim of the study is threefold: to assemble the documents regarding MNA's institutional connections, to investigate the nature of those relations, and to contribute to the Mesopotamian prosopography of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The results of the work clearly supersede the objectives planned by the author; it is a most successful reconstruction of Babylonian society and economy in the times of king Darius.

The book is divided into four parts. Part one gives a very useful introduction to the Egibi family, to the origins of its wealth and influence, followed by a study of MNA's ties to the two major Babylonian economic institutions of the period, the state (chapter two) and the temple (chapter three). Chapter two is subdivided according to the types of assets (taxes, boats, field-rents), and chapter three according to temple (such as the Esagil, the Temple of Nergal). In part two we find editions of 144 texts, both previously published and unpublished: fifty-eight re-editions (nos. 16, 88-124, 126-44), and more than eighty new texts (nos. 1-15, 17-87, 125), the majority of which are not copied here, because they will be presented in a volume of copies by Bertin. Part three contains indexes of personal names, toponyms, names of temples and deities, as well as an index of professional names and a list of texts cited in the book. In part four, the author presents the autographed copies of nineteen hitherto unpublished texts from the British Museum.

The Egibi family was the product of a new area. They rose as the result of a new structuring of economy and society in Babylonia at the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The Egibis were outsiders to the traditional Babylonian system of land owners and families connected to the state and temple (such as priests and prebend holders). The rise of the Egibis was that of the urban middle and upper-middle classes, enriched by trade in commodities, investment in real estate, participation in agricultural management of land belonging to...