This small clay cuneiform tablet belongs to the administrative archive of Ebabbar, the great temple of the sun-god Shamash at Sippar in central Mesopotamia. Dating to approximately 604–562 BC, it falls squarely within the Neo-Babylonian period, overlapping the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar II and his immediate predecessors. The tablet records the delivery of animals designated for sacrificial offering, a routine genre of temple bookkeeping well attested across the Ebabbar corpus. Such documents logged the movement of livestock—commonly sheep, goats, and cattle—into the temple's cultic economy, tracking accountability between herdsmen, administrators, and priests. The Ebabbar archive as a whole comprises thousands of tablets recovered from Sippar, illuminating how a major Babylonian temple managed property, labor, and ritual supply during the period when Judah fell to Babylon and its population was deported (2 Kings 24–25; Jeremiah 52). While the tablet makes no direct reference to Israelites or biblical figures, it situates the precise institutional and economic world in which exilic Judeans lived: the same Babylonian temple-state apparatus governed agriculture, animal husbandry, and religious life across the region. The document also provides comparative context for understanding Hebrew sacrificial administration described in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel's later temple vision, revealing that meticulous record-keeping of sacrificial animals was standard throughout ancient Near Eastern temple practice. The tablet was purchased in 1886 and is now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of Ancient West Asian Art. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession record); Jursa, M., Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (2010); Harris, R., Ancient Sippar: A Demographic Study of an Old-Babylonian City (1975); Bongenaar, A.C.V.M., The Neo-Babylonian Ebabbar Temple at Sippar (1997).
As a product of the Ebabbar temple archive at Sippar, this tablet documents the sacrificial and administrative infrastructure of the very Babylonian world in which the Judean exiles of the sixth century BC were embedded, offering concrete institutional context for the biblical exile narratives. It also demonstrates that systematic accounting of animals for offering was a widespread Near Eastern practice, informing comparative study of Israelite sacrificial legislation.