Murašû Archive

The Murašû Archive is a collection of cuneiform tablets excavated between 1888 and 1900 from the ruins of Nippur in central Babylonia, recording four generations of business dealings by the Murašû family firm under Persian rule during the reigns of Artaxerxes I, Darius II and Artaxerxes II. The tablets document the activities of the firm leasing land, managing crop production, collecting taxes on behalf of the Achaemenid administration, and extending silver loans, making the archive the most detailed surviving record of everyday economic life in Persian-controlled Babylonia during the last century and a half of Achaemenid rule. Historians use it to reconstruct how the Persian empire drew on local intermediaries and provincial resources to sustain its administration and military across a vast territory.