Nimrud Tablets, 1956: Economic and Legal Texts from the Nabu Temple

Abstract

The small group of tablets here published is the first collection of temple economic texts of the late Assyrian period to be discovered. Although therefore, the selection is limited, they are of particular interest. Except for two tablets recording gifts to the temple of land and slaves, they consist of heart-shaped dockets recording debts of grain owed to the temple. They are of the usual late Assyrian form for this kind of document, with holes for string by which they were suspended, or perhaps tied to sacks; remains of the string were still in the holes when they were excavated. They were found together in a pit on top of a cut down wall between rooms N.T. 14 and 16, on the south side of the inner courtyard to the temple. They are dated between 668 and 652 B.C., except for an isolated tablet (ND. 5457) which is dated 699 B.C. Of the twenty-one dockets, eight are dated in the spring of 661 B.C., five of them on two succeeding days, 27th and 28th of Addaru (ND. 5447, 5452, 5454, 5459). The god Nabu is named as creditor (lit. the amount of the debt “belongs to Nabu”), and the normal commercial rates of interest are charged, although there is a greater proportion of debts with low interest. There are some debts without interest, or so it appears; on others 20, 30, 40, and 50 per cent. is charged. The rate seems to depend on the security of the debtor in relation to the amount of the debt (we have no evidence from Calah of rates in bad years of scarcity), for of the debts with the highest interest, 5448 involves a large amount of grain, and a pledge is required as security, 5461 and 5465 are cases in which harvesting labour is required as a condition of credit and probably acts as security. In the five dockets of the 27th and 28th of Addaru, 661 B.C., the interest charged varies between 20 and 40 per cent., and in some cases there is no interest at all.