KAJ 247: workers and a temple account

Identify the surviving object

The ATMAP/TCMA edition identifies KAJ 247 as CDLI P282259, collection VAT 08971, with excavation label Ass 14446 df from the M 09 archive at Aššur. These parallel identifiers refer to a single tablet, not several separate witnesses. Its catalogue marks the subgenre as a possible receipt. The findspot and archival label are firmer starting points than any imagined reconstruction of the group who used the document.

Follow the line divisions

The English edition associates the opening obverse with a group of twenty-two workers and an event interpreted as a banquet; the worker term itself and the precise nature of the event are qualified in the edition. Later lines refer to a temple and a person in charge, while the reverse contains language of performance or receipt and an eponym date. These observations require the source edition, not an unsupported modern narrative of a festival.

Work, institutions and surviving voices

The tablet makes institutional labour visible through the vocabulary of a particular record. It does not establish whether the listed people volunteered, were paid, belonged to a particular household or experienced the occasion in the way the institution represented it. A temple setting also does not settle the religious convictions of everyone present. Social history begins by noticing which people an official document counts and which people it leaves unnamed.

The entry connects 22 people with a banquet, temple activity and named responsibility. It also refers to a writing-board associated with Sin-ashared, linking surviving clay with another writing surface.

The mechanism matters: someone needed to account for organised personnel and an institution's activity. The worker category remains tentative. The record can illuminate organisation without proving that all people listed shared a precise legal status.

Uncertainty and the next check

The editorial question mark after the genre and the qualified worker reading should travel with any research reuse of this item. A future Assyriologist should collate the obverse and reverse against the published signs, account for any broken text and confirm the administrative verbs before translating the entry as an undisputed receipt. The archive links the edition and paraphrases its research value; it has not independently translated the Akkadian.

An obligation, a report of performance and acknowledgement by a responsible party are different stages. Interpreting the verbs is therefore central to deciding what the writer recorded.

A banquet also required resources and organisation even where the account does not describe all provisions. The text's human significance lies in the relationship between an institution and the people counted in its work, rather than an imagined festival reconstructed from one uncertain entry.