Harvest Texts in the British Museum

This volume gives publication to 122 documents, kept at the British Museum in London, probably coming from Sippar and Tell ed-Dêr, in Northern Mesopotamia. The tablets date back from the First Dynasty of Babylon, from the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.) until the reign of Samsu-ditana (1625-1595 B.C.). All the texts included here have to do with harvesting, even if they belong to different typologies. In the first chapter 79 economic documents are provided in transliteration and translated; the majority of them (58, 5 of which with case) are harvest labour contracts, the others being lists of numbers followed by personal names, lists of quantities of barley or silver followed by personal names, contracts for the loan of a specific numbers of harvesters, whereas two texts record debts of harvesters and one text records the interest accumulated for the harvesting. In the second chapter 43 texts are published, most of which are three-sided clay pyramids bullae or dockets (23), often with a hole in the apex; the others are parallelepiped tags or receipts of harvesters (18), along with some receipts with different shapes. The texts are arranged inside each chapter in chronological order, so as to clarify the connections between the persons that more frequently occur in the several typologies of texts in different positions.