Prices and related data from northern Babylonia in the Late Achaemenid and Early Hellenistic periods, c. 480–300 BC 1

This chapter presents a preliminary survey of price data and rations culled from legal and administrative documents ² as well as so-called astronomical diaries (ADs) from Late Achaemenid and Early Hellenistic northern Babylonia. The textual material under consideration offers datasets for a whole range of commodities to be used in the analysis of price behaviour in the period following the ‘long sixth century’. ³ However, the investigation of price developments is fraught with problems during the period under consideration, mainly owing to the incompleteness of the data. The near-absence of usable data from especially the fifth century BC, rendering exact reconstructions of price behaviour impossible, can be correlated to a general scarcity of archival texts post-dating the second year of Xerxes (484 BC). Likewise, the ADs, ⁴ the richest source of commodity prices from the Late Achaemenid, Seleucid and Parthian periods, offer little information on the fifth and early fourth centuries BC. However, the small number of attestations notwithstanding, some general trends can be described anyway.