ABSTRACT
The first millennium BC is one of the best documented periods of Mesopotamianhistory. Both archaeological remains and textual sources are available in abundance, but their diachronic distribution is uneven.1 The first two centuries are only very scarcely documented and contemporary texts are rare. Assyrian sources and later chronicles suggest that this was a period of unrest, collapse of central authority and general economic decline. The eighth and especially the seventh century have yielded slightly richer documentation, for instance an eighth-century letter archive from central Babylonian Nippur (Cole 1996). This is also the period at the end of which a gradual increase both of the number and the size of settlements first becomes perceptible in the archaeological record. From about 700 BC onwards, demographic growth and increasing urbanisation are the decisive economic trends, especially for northern Babylonia, well into the Sassanian period. At the culmination of this development, in the first centuries AD, probably the entire agriculturally usable area of the southern alluvium had been taken under the plough.
