Managing the harvest: The administration of agricultural production in Kassite Babylonia

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The proposed project aims at examining centralized harvest management in Babylonia between the second half of the 14th century and the end of the 13th century BC through an analysis of published and unpublished cuneiform tablets from the religious and political capital Nippur, as well as from a still unidentified town, which must have been a major administrative centre. In spite of the centrality of this subject for the reconstruction of ancient Near Eastern economic and social history, the mechanisms of managing cereals and other agricultural products during the long Kassite or Middle Babylonian era (ca. 1475-1155 BC) have previously been largely neglected in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, so that the potential of this research area remains far from being exhausted. The current project seeks to address this deficit and aims at studying these very mechanisms in order to understand how during the Kassite period the central administration exercised its interest in and control over agricultural production. In this way, substantial lacunae in the assessment and understanding of Babylonian economic history in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC can be filled, thus allowing the well-documented Kassite period to be integrated fully into current research on economy and administration of the ancient Near East.