The ancient city of Nippur was a vibrant and ethnically diverse polis populated by Babylonians and Non-Babylonians alike.

We set out to learn how religious Babylonians were in comparison to their non-Babylonian neighbors.

Traditionally, scholars have turned to priestly and regal texts to learn about a civilization.

However, these texts can only reveal how the elite groups practiced their relgions and shed little light on the practices and beliefs of commoners.

What information could there be that may uncover the religious participation of regular folk?

And, how much did such potential religious participation have to do with ethnicity?

In order to gain access to non-elite social circles, we combined information from two types of texts:

• common texts recording the transactions of middle class people;


• and a religious text known today as the Babylonian Almanac, which notes for each day of the calendar year whether it is positive/lucky or not.

Our expectation was that Babylonians would proscribe to the Babylonian Almanac and would avoid doing business on negative days, while targeting positive days for their transactions.

On the other hand, the transactions of non-Babylonians would be evenly distributed on both positive and negative days.

We identified 2,400 individuals from 800 texts, pulled from either the Murasu or Yahudu archives.

We then determined their ethnicity as either Babylonian, Aramean, Iranian or Judean.

Finally, we established whether they tended towards conducting transactions on positive ("good luck") or negative("bad luck") days.

In this visualization, each individual is represeted by a bubble. The size of the bubble is determined by the number of transactions the individual conducted in our corpus of texts.

The color of the circle represents the individuals tendency towards either conducting transactions on negative or positive days, which is measured on a scale from -1 to 1.

If an individual has a score of -1, then they conducted 100% of their transactions on a negative day and if their score is 1, then 100% of their transaction took place on a positive day. Individuals with scores in between had some mix of the two.