"Some Old Babylonian Dockets dealing with Sheep and Goats"

Our understanding of the Mesopotamian economy and social dynamics is mostly based on an imposing amount of original administrative documentation among which contracts, lists, receipts, and last but not least bullae or dockets. In this article, 12 dockets are published which are kept at the British Museum in London; they refer to small cattle, namely sheep and goats. These dockets, or better “animal tags”, have been connected to similar ones already published elsewhere; like those, each of them records an animal connected to a certain herdsman. The dockets are not dated and they bear no kind of seals, therefore they can only be dated generically to the Old Babylonian period. Nevertheless, the author makes some suggestions on their origin, mainly based on a prosopographic study of some shepherds' names occurring here as well as in the “animal tags” already published that also appear in texts most certainly coming from cities, as Sippar or Kisurra.