Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: (provisional) The Social World of Babylonian Priests
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Karen Radner
Caroline Waerzeggers |
About
My thesis, conducted in the framework of ERC Starting grant project BABYLON (PI: Caroline Waerzeggers), presents an investigation into Babylonian society, focusing on the city of Borsippa during Neo-Babylonian and early Persian rule (c. 620-484 BCE). The political changes affecting Babylonia during that time provide the backdrop for my analysis.
Priestly families occupied the highest echelons of Babylonian society and often managed to maintain their positions in religious as well as civic institutions over multiple generations. In the temples, their activities were structured according to a strict hierarchy based on notions of purity and proximity to the gods. The question that arises is whether their social lives were affected by this ideology. Improving our knowledge of how these families interacted in the community will increase our understanding of Babylonian society as a whole – which is an understudied area of Ancient Near Eastern History at the moment.
In my thesis I will investigate the following series of social interactions to explore if and how priestly life was affected by concepts of hierarchy and rank: a) marriage practice, b) patterns of landownership, c) money lending and other credit operations, and d) circles of trust and intimacy. By establishing the identity of the persons with whom they interacted I will be able to determine to what extent and in which areas priests adhered to the temple hierarchy. This investigation will be based on the priestly family archives from Borsippa, which constitute a representative and homogenous corpus consisting of circa 2.000 cuneiform texts.
My aim is to locate the priests in Neo-Babylonian society. By combining the traditional method of closely reading the archives with the experimental technique of Social Network Analysis and using Sociological theories and Anthropological studies as frames of reference, this investigation will attempt to raise Neo-Babylonian studies to a new level of sophistication and contribute towards integrating this still very specialized field into a more general historical discourse.
