# Lesson 3: Contracts and Administrative Texts

This lesson covers the practical texts that kept the Babylonian economy running: receipts, lists, and formal contracts.

## Core Texts to Read
> **PLACEHOLDER:** Please insert a text reading here from a publication (e.g., Old Babylonian real estate contracts, or neo-Babylonian receipts).
> *Suggested citation*: Charpin, D. 2010. *Writing, Law, and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia*. University of Chicago Press. Focus on dates, commodities, numbers, and witness lists.

## Grammatical Focus (Reference to Appendix)
We will observe:
- Babylonian numbers and measures
- Sumerograms (logograms) for standard commodities and professions
- The passive stems (N-stem) frequently used in contracts

## Digital Methods
> **PLACEHOLDER:** Explore structuring administrative records using Pandas DataFrames or JSON, extracting entities and quantifying the data.