The Role of the nadiātum of Šamaš and of Some Officials in Old Babylonian Sippar Organization of Agricultural Work

Thanks to a Research Fellowship at the Università di Messina, I had the opportunity of studying more than 120 texts kept at the British Museum, coming in all likelihood from the area of Sippar, in Northern Mesopotamia. All the Old Babylonian texts I studied, published in Rositani (2011), have to do with harvesting. The organization of the agricultural work in the OB period was quite complex. On this occasion I attempt to provide a possible reconstruction of some aspects of this organization in Northern Mesopotamia, based on the evidence coming from the texts I studied and on the data coming from the texts previously published. On this occasion I will try to look at these texts from a different point of view from the one adopted in my previous publications. In my book I focused on the role of beneficiaries of the assignments, their status seems to be that of ‘labourer providers’ or ‘labour contractors’, whose only task is the hiring of harvesters. But if the beneficiaries of the assignment can be considered as the ‘labour contractors, who are the people who commission the ‘labourer providers’ to hire harvesters? Whose were the fields in which ‘labour contractors’ have to take the harvesters? Were they public fields or private ones? And if the fields were public, did they belong to the crown, the local power or the Šamaš temple? If the fields were private, who were the landowners? From many texts indeed we know that wealthy citizens of Sippar – among who were temple officials, nadiātu women and municipal administrative officials – were large landowners, some of them are mentioned in harvest texts.