Capacity measures in context I: The issue of conversions

The different phrases relating to measures that appear in documentation dating from the Old Babylonian and Middle Assyrian periods are generally considered as indications of the types of measurement standards used. Some texts, in documentation from both periods, even testify to conversions between different measurement standards. By not only focusing on terminology issues and by putting the transactions of goods that are at stake in the texts back into their contexts, we propose to interpret these phrases not as the recording of tangible usage of measures but rather as the administrative information that refers to management issues such as the way of obtaining grain, its origin in the administrative process, and the people involved in both economic and institutional areas. By studying some cases taken from both documentation from both periods, we intend to show that what is written in the accounting texts does not only come down to the recording of real data but also includes projected and organizational data illustrating how institutions were committed to providing or withdrawing some of the quantities involved in a transaction.