A Late Babylonian Tribute List?

It would seem appropriate in this fiftieth anniversary of the School to present a hitherto unpublished, though regrettably fragmentary, Babylonian text which provides new political and economic information concerning Egypt, Syria, Persia, and Babylonia, and possibly Anatolia (most of the area of studies covered by the present Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East). Such detail for the region in the middle or late first millennium B.C. is rare since, apart from the copying of traditional religious and legal texts, the Babylonian scribes now used the Aramaic script upon perishable writing-boards or parchment scrolls. The tablet (BM 82684 and 82685 which do not join) was acquired by the British Museum in 1894 ; its provenance may well have been Babylon itself. The original comprised more than six columns, written in a fine small ' Neo-Babylonian' hand, of which parts of three are extant. The text (p. 497) reads :