The Ilia A archive: The Babylonian socio-economic landscape as mirrored in the archive of a priestly family in the first millennium BCE

My research entails the first scholarly edition and study of a Neo-Babylonian private archive, known in literature as the “Ilia A archive”. The archive contains circa 300 cuneiform tablets which were written and stored by the members of a well-to-do family, the Ilia A, who lived in the region of Babylonia during the second half of the first-millennium BCE. The texts record their business and legal interests, as well as their social interactions. Through the complete transliteration and translation of these texts, my research produces a large amount of new data that have been used to conduct an in-depth analysis of the socio-economic conditions in which the family lived, developed their successful careers and created networks of social and business relationships. By adopting the findings on the Ilia A archive as a case study, this research aims to strengthen our knowledge of the socio-economic landscape of first-millennium BCE Babylonia.