Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GoviB (Governance in Babylon: Negotiating the Rule of Three Empires)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-06-30
The ancient city of Babylon, capital of several kingdoms for more than a thousand years, was occasionally conquered and sacked, but its civic institutions – the municipal bodies of self-governance and the temples – survived the vicissitudes of history. The elite citizens of ancient Babylon developed a self-assured idea about Babylon’s place in the world. For them, the city was the physical and metaphorical navel of the world, the umbilical cord where heaven and earth connected. Along with two other ancient Babylonian cities, it claimed a special status that effectively curtailed the sovereign rights of the ruler. In the late 8th century BC, Babylon became for the first time subject to an empire. The localised Babylonian concept of governance over the city was confronted with the imperial idea. What followed was a long struggle over how Babylon could and should be ruled. The three consecutive empires around the middle of the first millennium — the Neo-Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian, and the Persian (late 8th – 4th c. BC) — probed various strategies, until eventually the imperial concept prevailed.
Babylon was excavated by a German archaeological mission between 1899 and 1917. They found thousands of clay tablets from private and public archives that have never been published and studied. These documents have the potential to provide new insights into the development of elite families and the civic institutions from the late 8th to the 4th century BC. The first aim of GoviB is to produce a scholarly edition and thorough study of this treasure trove. In the second phase, we will use these new documents to investigate how the city was governed, how the physical shape of the city, its civic institutions and its elite families changed over time. Particular attention will be paid to the regime changes, how they occurred and what they meant for the local elite shortly thereafter, and one or two generations later. Regime changes are pivotal moments in history. How governance is perceived, regulated and implemented often determines the success or failure of states. GoviB aims to contribute a historical case study to this broader question of what makes states stable or unstable, and how regime change fails or succeeds.
Babylon was excavated by a German archaeological mission between 1899 and 1917. They found thousands of clay tablets from private and public archives that have never been published and studied. These documents have the potential to provide new insights into the development of elite families and the civic institutions from the late 8th to the 4th century BC. The first aim of GoviB is to produce a scholarly edition and thorough study of this treasure trove. In the second phase, we will use these new documents to investigate how the city was governed, how the physical shape of the city, its civic institutions and its elite families changed over time. Particular attention will be paid to the regime changes, how they occurred and what they meant for the local elite shortly thereafter, and one or two generations later. Regime changes are pivotal moments in history. How governance is perceived, regulated and implemented often determines the success or failure of states. GoviB aims to contribute a historical case study to this broader question of what makes states stable or unstable, and how regime change fails or succeeds.
The main task for the first half of the project was to document the cuneiform tablets, most of which are housed in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. Some of them had to be treated by a conservator before we could get our hands on them. The conservation work has been completed, and all the tablets have been photographed using RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) technology, which produces excellent images with very high resolution and with the ability to change the light. Most of the archival tablets were also scanned using the museum’s 3D stripe-light scanner. 42 texts are already online ( https://miami.uni-muenster.de/Search/Results?lookfor=GoviB&type=AllFields&limit=20) and the rest of the documentation will be published together with the scholarly editions of the texts. These editions are currently at an advanced stage. A well-preserved tablet interesting as an individual text for its content, has been edited in a scientific article (Boivin, in press, in "Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte"). Three academic articles deal with aspects of governance in Babylon and Babylonia. One examines the structuring devices in the so-called “Babylonian Mirror of Princes”, a key text on Babylonian governance. The second investigated the roles which Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian kings and crown princes assumed in their epistolary communication with citizens of Babylonian cities and temple officials. The third dealt with the validity of a normative legal text and royal edicts in the Neo-Babylonian period.
We have presented our research on several international conferences and organised a panel workshop on “New Research on the City of Babylon”. We have also created an informative website (https://www.uni-muenster.de/GoviB/) for the general public, containing a description of the project, the methods used, blogs on the city of Babylon, the history of the excavations and the Babylon Guest Book.
We have presented our research on several international conferences and organised a panel workshop on “New Research on the City of Babylon”. We have also created an informative website (https://www.uni-muenster.de/GoviB/) for the general public, containing a description of the project, the methods used, blogs on the city of Babylon, the history of the excavations and the Babylon Guest Book.
The first-time documentation of the large body of cuneiform texts from Babylon in high-quality images is a significant achievement that helps to preserve this cultural heritage. We will make all images available open access. In order to increase the viewing experience of the user, we are about to create an online RTI viewer. Until the end of the project, the scholarly editions will be made available to the public in printed volumes and in open access, and a study of aspects of governance in Babylon will appear in a separate volume.