This clay cuneiform tablet, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession via purchase, 1886), is a fragmentary administrative document dealing with land disposition. It is assigned to the Esagilaya archive — a body of records associated with the great temple complex of Esagila in Babylon, dedicated to the god Marduk — and dated to approximately 536 BC, placing it squarely within the early Achaemenid period, shortly after Cyrus the Great's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. The tablet is written in the standard Late Babylonian cuneiform script typical of temple and commercial archives from this era. Its content concerns the transfer or management of land holdings, a routine but historically significant class of transaction well attested across Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid administrative corpora. The date of this tablet carries direct relevance to the biblical record. According to Ezra 1:1–4, Cyrus issued his famous edict permitting exiled Judeans to return to their homeland and rebuild the Jerusalem temple, an event the text dates to the first year of his reign — broadly consistent with 538–536 BC. The Cyrus Cylinder (British Museum) independently attests to his policy of restoring displaced peoples and their sanctuaries, corroborating the biblical portrait of Cyrus as an instrument of restoration (cf. Isaiah 44:28–45:1, where he is named explicitly). A tablet from the Esagila archive dated 536 BC thus documents the administrative environment of Babylon at precisely the moment when, according to Ezra, the first wave of returning exiles was being organized. It does not verify the edict's details but anchors the broader documentary context. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession record); Amélie Kuhrt, 'The Cyrus Cylinder and Achaemenid Imperial Policy,' JSOT 25 (1983); Matthew Stolper, 'Mesopotamia, 482–330 B.C.,' Cambridge Ancient History Vol. VI.
A dated Esagila archive tablet from 536 BC illustrates the active Babylonian administrative world within which the early Achaemenid period — and the biblical account of the Judean return from exile under Cyrus — is set, providing material texture for that pivotal transition without overreaching into proof of specific biblical events.