This small clay cuneiform tablet, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1886 and dated to approximately 547 BC, records a slave-sale transaction and belongs to the celebrated Egibi archive—one of the best-documented private business archives from Neo-Babylonian Mesopotamia. The Egibi family, based in Babylon, operated as merchants, moneylenders, and property managers across several generations spanning roughly the seventh through early fifth centuries BC, leaving behind hundreds of legal and commercial tablets that illuminate everyday economic life in the empire. Written in the standard Late Babylonian cuneiform script, such sale documents typically identify the enslaved individual by name, specify the purchase price in silver shekels, name the buyer and seller, list witnesses, and record the date according to the regnal year of the reigning king—in this period, Nabonidus (r. 556–539 BC). The tablet's approximate date of 547 BC places it squarely within the era when many Judean deportees and their descendants were living and working in Babylonia following Nebuchadnezzar II's campaigns against Jerusalem (2 Kings 24–25). Scholars have identified individuals with Yahwistic names in related Neo-Babylonian archives, suggesting that Judean exiles participated in—and were sometimes subject to—the same commercial and legal structures documented here. The tablet does not itself reference Judeans, but it materially illustrates the legal framework of slavery and debt that the exilic community navigated. It corroborates the historical reality of sophisticated Babylonian commercial institutions precisely when and where the biblical exile tradition is set. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession record); Cornelia Wunsch, 'The Egibi Family,' in *The Babylonian World* (Routledge, 2007); Laurie Pearce & Cornelia Wunsch, *Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia* (CUSAS 28, 2014).
As part of the Egibi archive, this tablet provides rare documentary evidence of the Babylonian legal and commercial world in which Judean exiles lived during the sixth century BC, grounding the biblical account of the exile in a well-attested socioeconomic context.