This small clay tablet, written in cuneiform script, dates to approximately the 7th–6th century BC and originates from Mesopotamia. It belongs to the administrative archive of the Ebabbar, the great temple of the sun-god Shamash located at Sippar. Acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1886, the tablet records the allocation of animal fodder — likely barley or other grain distributed to livestock maintained by or for the temple institution. Such documents are characteristic of the Neo-Babylonian period (c. 626–539 BC), during which temple estates operated as major economic centers, managing herds, agricultural land, labor forces, and commodity distribution through meticulous written record-keeping. The Ebabbar archive at Sippar is among the best-documented temple archives from ancient Mesopotamia, with thousands of tablets attesting to the institution's role as a hub of commercial, legal, and administrative life. Fodder-allocation tablets like this one illuminate the scale of livestock management connected to sacrificial and agricultural operations — activities reflecting the broader ancient Near Eastern temple economy that formed the backdrop to much of the Hebrew Bible's world. The Neo-Babylonian empire is directly attested in Scripture as the power that destroyed Jerusalem and deported much of its population (2 Kings 24–25; Jeremiah 52). While this tablet makes no explicit reference to Judah or Israelite affairs, it is contemporaneous with that deportation period and represents the administrative culture of the very empire into which biblical figures such as Daniel and Ezekiel were exiled. It offers material evidence of Babylonian institutional life during one of the most consequential periods in Israelite history. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. purchase 1886); Jursa, M., Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (2010); Bongenaar, A.C.V.M., The Neo-Babylonian Ebabbar Temple at Sippar (1997).
This administrative tablet from the Ebabbar temple archive provides concrete evidence of the bureaucratic and economic infrastructure of Neo-Babylonian Mesopotamia — the same imperial context in which the Hebrew Bible situates the Babylonian exile of Judah in the 6th century BC. It illustrates the scale and complexity of the temple economy that formed the social environment experienced by Jewish deportees in Babylon.