This fragmentary clay tablet, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1886, belongs to the Ebabbar archive—the administrative and cultic record corpus associated with the temple of Shamash (the sun-god) at Sippar, one of the most prolific documentary archives recovered from ancient Mesopotamia. Inscribed in cuneiform script, the fragment dates broadly to the Neo-Babylonian or Achaemenid period, roughly the 7th through 4th centuries BC, a span encompassing the late Assyrian collapse, the Chaldean empire of Nebuchadnezzar II, and the subsequent Persian administration of Babylon. Ebabbar tablets typically record temple revenues, ration disbursements, land leases, silver transactions, commodity exchanges, and priestly obligations, reflecting the sophisticated administrative machinery that sustained major Babylonian sanctuaries across multiple ruling dynasties. The biblical record intersects this archive's historical horizon at several points. The Neo-Babylonian empire is the political power that destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC and carried Judean leadership into exile (2 Kings 25; Jeremiah 52). The Achaemenid period opens with Cyrus II's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, an event corroborated by the Cyrus Cylinder, after which the edict permitting exiled peoples to return is recorded in Ezra 1. Sippar itself survived the Persian transition with considerable institutional continuity, and Ebabbar archive documents attest that Achaemenid kings—including Darius and Artaxerxes—maintained patronage of Babylonian temples, illuminating the administrative world through which returned exiles and their Persian-era contemporaries moved. The fragment does not bear any name or text identifiable with biblical figures; its value is contextual rather than direct. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession records); R. Zadok, 'Individuals and Families of Various Professions in the Ebabbar Archive,' NABU (1997); M. Jursa, Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (Ugarit-Verlag, 2010).
Tablets from the Ebabbar archive provide granular documentary evidence of Babylonian institutional life across the very centuries the Hebrew Bible describes exile and return, grounding the biblical narrative in a recoverable administrative and economic context. They demonstrate the continuity of Mesopotamian temple culture under successive Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian rulers—the same sequence of powers whose policies shaped the fate of Judah and the Jewish diaspora.