This project presents a digital corpus of cuneiform tablets that contain information about the Babylonian city. The focus is presently on archival texts of the first millennium BC that concern urban properties – mainly houses, but also unbuilt plots and occasionally other kinds of structures. The tablets include legal and administrative documents from both private family archives and institutional (temple) archives. Documents that involve the transfer of urban properties, such as records of sale and inheritance, are particularly important since they often contained a detailed description of the property together with information about its immediate surroundings, including neighbouring properties and topographical features such as streets and canals. They also convey information about the social setting, shedding light on conditions of urban property ownership and tenure as well as on the people involved (buyers, sellers, heirs, tenants, neighbours, etc.).
This website is currently under construction. The BabCity Corpus can be consulted, as can the Bibliography by Site, and the Archives on which the corpus is based.
Team
Heather D. Baker (University of Toronto)
Graduate Students
Nicole Brandt (2017–2018, digital editions)
Lindsay Post (2017–2018, digital editions)
Jinyan Wang (2019–2021, digital editions)
Mohammad Raza Haider (2021, digital editions)
Undergraduate Students
Keara Reilly (2020–2021, web platform)
Shane Joy (2021, web platform)
Acknowledgements
The University of Toronto's Work Study Program has provided most of the funding for the work of the student assistants listed above. Grant Frame, Michael Jursa, and Stefan Zawadzki kindly supplied electronic versions of their text editions to facilitate conversion into digital format. Special thanks are owed to Jaimie Novotny, who guided me throughout the process of creating this platform, and to Steve Tinney for his help in resolving technical issues.
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