The Khalili collection
of Aramaic documents

The institutional overview lists forty-eight objects: thirty leather documents and eighteen wooden tally sticks. Letters and accounts concern officials including Akhvamazda and Bagavant. Their subjects include provisions, construction and obligations imposed on subordinates. The tally sticks preserve accounting through matching halves and notches, a material practice distinct from a letter's written instructions.²

The overview gives the principal group a range of 353–324 BCE. That range is not a date for every object. Margaretha Folmer notes that the editors assigned one letter, B10, to the earlier fifth century on the basis of its handwriting.³

Folmer describes the objects as having unknown provenance. Their association with Bactria rests on textual interpretation rather than a documented excavation. She also distinguishes Bagavant's explicit title from Akhvamazda's reconstructed position:

The letters were sent by a certain Akhvamazda, whose position is not indicated in the letters.⁴

The inference that he was a satrap draws on his authority over Bagavant and the places and activities discussed. The surviving texts therefore illuminate an administrative hierarchy while leaving parts of that hierarchy to scholarly reconstruction.⁵

Aramaic texts also belong to the history of יהודים YEHUDIM, but this administrative collection is not a document produced by or for יהודים YEHUDIM merely because it is written in Aramaic. Folmer points to a Bactrian named in a separate Elephantine legal text as evidence for contact between Bactrian individuals and Judean or Aramaic-speaking communities. That comparison places the collection within a wider imperial world; it does not establish that its officials belonged to a community of יהודים YEHUDIM.⁶

• How does a reconstructed administrative archive differ from a collection with a recorded excavation context?
• What evidence would distinguish shared language from membership in a community of יהודים YEHUDIM?