The use of cuneiform as a recording medium survived in Babylonia some 500 years after the loss of political independence. Records from the Arsacid period, however, are not numerous nor have those published been subject to systematic study. The texts presented here are among the latest administrative records in cuneiform and are concerned primarily with recording the income and expenditures of the temples of Babylon. The texts were originally housed in the Bodleian library but now are kept in the Ashmolean museum. They were first described by R. Campbell Thompson in his Catalogue of the Late Babylonian Tablets in the Bodleian Library, where he described the tablets without giving copies or transliterations.

The temple accounts published here consist of an introductory statement giving the amount of the income of a certain temple for a specific period of time, which is usually either approximately one month or multiples of a month. This is followed by a list of specific expenditures and the remainder, which was then deposited or re-deposited, as the case may be, with a private banker. We know from other sources that the right to act as banker was leased by the temples for specific periods to private individuals, who put in tenders to the temple assembly for this right.