This fragmentary clay tablet, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1886, belongs to the administrative archive of Ebabbar, the great temple of the sun-god Shamash at Sippar in central Mesopotamia. Written in cuneiform script, the tablet dates broadly to the Neo-Babylonian or Achaemenid period, roughly the 7th through 4th centuries BC, a span encompassing the reigns of the late Assyrian successors, the Neo-Babylonian dynasty (626–539 BC), and the subsequent Persian rule under Cyrus II and his heirs. The Ebabbar archive is one of the most extensively documented institutional corpora from ancient Mesopotamia, comprising thousands of tablets recording temple income, land leases, labor assignments, ration distributions, and commodity transactions. Such records illuminate how major Babylonian sanctuaries functioned as economic engines embedded within both local and imperial administrative structures. The Achaemenid period represented in this date range corresponds to the era following Cyrus II's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, an event referenced in Ezra 1 and 2 Chronicles 36:22–23, which describe a royal edict permitting exiled Judeans to return to their homeland. While this particular tablet fragment has not been linked to any specifically biblical individual or event, the broader Ebabbar corpus provides material context for understanding Babylonian institutional life during the very decades the Hebrew Bible describes Judean deportees living and working in Mesopotamia. The tablet is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Accession context: Purchase, 1886). Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art collection records; Jursa, M., Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (AOAT 377, 2010); MacGinnis, J., Letter Orders from Sippar and the Administration of the Ebabbara in the Late-Babylonian Period (1995).
Tablets from the Ebabbar archive document the economic and administrative environment of Babylonian Sippar across the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, providing institutional context for the biblical accounts of Judean exile and repatriation under Achaemenid rule.