This fifth volume of the Babil-series presents an edition of 105 texts from the German excavations in the Merkez area at Babylon, which were carried out between 1905 and 1916. Today, most of these texts are held at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. Due to the turmoil of the two World Wars, which disrupted the excavations in Babylon, as well as the political and economic problems in the years that followed, these texts unfortunately remained unedited for more than a century.
The texts are presented here in transliteration, translation, and commentary, accompanied by numerous photographs and a comprehensive online documentation. They date from the Neo-Babylonian and Late Babylonian periods, covering the span from the reign of the late Neo-Assyrian kings in the mid-8th century BCE down to the Seleucid period in the mid-3rd century BCE. They comprise a wide range of economic, judicial, and administrative records, as well as letters. They do not actually originate from clearly defined archives, but from various loosely connected contexts scattered throughout the entire inner city of Babylon, hence the term “assemblage”. Nevertheless, they provide a rich source of new names of people and places, as well as dated records of scribes, judges, and other municipal or cultic officials.