My work on these and other Achaemenid Babylonian texts has been supported in part by a Summer Stipend and subsequent Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by a Grant-in-Aid from the American Council of Learned Societies. I am indebted to L. T. Geraty and William Shea for permission to publish a text from the Horn Archaeological Museum, Andrews University; to C. B. F. Walker and Erle V. Leichty for help with texts in the collections of the British Museum, and to the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to publish them; to Roger Moorey for access to the collections of the Ashmolean Museum and to Francis Joannes for sharing information on the late Babylonian texts in the Ashmolean; to Marc van de Mieroop, Kenneth Lohf and Rudolph Ellenbogen for making a text from the collection of the Butler Library at Columbia University available to me and for permission to publish it; to John Pedley for permission to publish a text in the Kelsey Museum; to the Institut für Assyriologie und Hethitologie of the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität, Munich, for hospitality and resources when early drafts of these remarks were being prepared; to Martha T. Roth, Erica Reiner, and John A. Brinkman for comments and criticism. Responsibility for errors is mine.

Abbreviations are those of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), with the following additions and exceptions: AUAM = tablets in the collection of the Horn Archaeological Museum, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan; Entrepreneurs and Empire = Matthew W. Stolper, Entrepreneurs and Empire (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1985).

Babylonian dates are cited in this form: day (in Arabic numerals)/month (in roman numerals)/regnal year (in Arabic numerals) king's name; month VIb = intercalary Ulūlu; month XIIb = intercalary Addaru. Personal names are sometimes cited in this form: name/patronym.