From Hand to Hand: Tracking the Workflow of Kassite Officials

Cuneiform tablets from Kassite Babylonia record the names of thousands of individuals who interacted at different levels with the institutions that produced these texts. A useful criterion to recognize, among them, those who had an active role in the resource management is looking for personal names that follow the term “hand” (Akk. qatum), which in this context signifies authority and control over goods and individuals. The paper offers a detailed study of the data about Mudammiq-Adad, a scribe whose “hand” played a significant role in the administrative system recorded by the texts from Dur-Enlile. By analyzing his activities and interactions with other individuals, this study sheds light on a network of closely interacting agents, offers new insights into the role of scribes within the administration and highlights the collaborative rather than hierarchical nature of their participation in the operational dynamics of the economic organization they worked for.