This small clay cuneiform tablet, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1886, originates from ancient Mesopotamia and is dated to approximately 605 BC or 584 BC, corresponding to the 20th regnal year of either Nabopolassar (r. c. 626–605 BC) or his son Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BC). The tablet belongs to the Ebabbar archive, a substantial corpus of administrative records associated with the temple of Shamash at Sippar, one of the principal cult centers of ancient Babylonia. Written in the cuneiform script characteristic of the Neo-Babylonian period, the document records an account of sheep holdings distributed across households for use in temple offerings—a routine but illuminating specimen of Babylonian cultic administration. The Ebabbar archive as a whole documents the economic machinery that sustained Babylonian state religion: the procurement, allocation, and sacrifice of animals integral to daily temple ritual. This tablet reflects the kind of large-scale institutional management that characterized the Neo-Babylonian Empire at its height. The figure of Nebuchadnezzar II connects directly to the biblical record: he is the Babylonian king whose campaigns against Judah resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BC and the deportation of Judean elites described in 2 Kings 24–25, Jeremiah, and Daniel. While this administrative tablet bears no direct reference to Judah or its people, it provides concrete material evidence of the imperial bureaucratic culture within which those events unfolded. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession and collection records); Joannès, F., Archives de Borsippa (for Neo-Babylonian temple archive context); Bongenaar, A.C.V.M., The Neo-Babylonian Ebabbar Temple at Sippar (1997).
This tablet offers a firsthand glimpse into the administrative infrastructure of the Neo-Babylonian temple economy during the reigns of the very kings whose campaigns against Judah are recorded in the Hebrew Bible, grounding the biblical narrative within a well-documented imperial context.