The Sons of Lâbâši: Entrepreneurship in Sixth Century BCE Larsa

Boivin, Odette

Abstract

The 201 tablets presented in this volume belonged to the private archive of the entrepreneur Itti-Šamaš-balāṭu, son of Lâbâši, which was later passed down to his son Arad-Šamaš who took over some of his father’s business activities. They were based in Larsa, now Tell Senkereh in Iraq, in the southern Euphrates area, and were active in the sixth century BCE, during the Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid periods. Textual sources from Larsa are scarce in this period, hence the corpus offers a unique insight into the city’s social and economic circumstances which are known otherwise mainly through the lens of its interactions with the Eanna temple in Uruk.