Lesson 3: Contracts and Administrative Texts

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.

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