Animal husbandry in times has been the subject of many important studies, including the pioneering treatise by M. San Nicolb2 and G. van Driel's studies published in the last decade.3 A great many among the numerous published texts concern the delivery of animals to the temple and the receipts given to individual herdsmen. Texts accounting for the development of a specific herd during a longer period, which could facilitate the study of bookkeeping practices, were unknown until 1999, when R. Sack published the remarkable tablet NBC 4897.4 In 1993, the text was discussed by G. van Driel,5 and again by the same scholar with K. Nemet-Nejat in 1994.6 The text is an account of the herd of sheep and goats which the managers of the Eanna temple entrusted to Nabfi-ahhe-gullim, son of Nabfi-umilkun, and covers the period from his first account in year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar to the spring of year 1 of Neriglissar. Sheep and goats are dealt with separately, each species broken down by sex and age groups. Thus, the first set of columns in the account refers to rams, ewes, male lambs and female lambs, and concludes with the number (the horizontal total as van Driel calls it); the second set of columns accounts for full-grown hegoats, she-goats, male kids and female kids, and is followed by their number (the second 1. I would like to express my profound gratitude for the discussion on the issues of the breeding of sheep and goats to A. Gut, Head of the Department of Sheep and Goat Breeding of the University of Agriculture in Poznaii, Michael Jursa, John MacGinnis, and to my collaborators at the Department of the History of the Ancient Near East: Jaroslaw Maniaczyk, Witold Tyborowski, Joanna Paszkowiak, as well as to Rafal Koliiiski of the Department of Archeology of the Adam Mickiewicz University. I would like to give particularly warm thanks to Paul-Alain Beaulieu, who kindly collated certain passages at Yale. The results of his collation are acknowledged where applicable. I also owe thanks to John MacGinnis, who kindly improved my English. 2. M. San Nicolb, Materialien zur Viehwirtschaft in den neubabylonischen Tempeln,' I Or 17 (1948) 273-93; II, Or 18 (1949) 288-306; III, Or20 (1951) 129-50; IV, Or 23 (1954) 35182; and V, Or 25 (1956) 24-38. 3. G. van Driel, Neo-Babylonian Sheep and Goats;' BSA 7 (1993) 219-58; Cattle in the Period7' BSA 8 (1995) 215-40. See also E. Gehlken, Uruk. Spatbabylonische Wirtschaftstexte aus dem Eanna-Archiv. Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka, Endberichte 11 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1990), 19-55 and A. C. V M. Bongenaar, The Ebabbar Temple at Sippar: Its Administration and Its Prosopography. (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1997), 415-22. An important study concerning animal husbandry in Sippar in early times has been published by R. Da Riva, Der Ebabbar-Tempel von Sippar infriihneubabylonischer Zeit, AOAT 291 (Mtinster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002) 173-309. 4. R. H. Sack, Some Notes on in Eanna,' in Sudies in Honor of Tom B. Jones, eds. M. A. Powell and Ronald H. Sack. AOAT 203 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1979), 111-18. 5. BSA 7 (1993) 233-35. 6. G. Van Driel, K. R. Nemet-Nejat, Bookkeeping Practices for an Institutional Herd at Eanna' JCS 46 (1994) 47-58. For convenience the transliteration and translation of the text is