"So since the business records of this banking house would have been targeted for destruction, they were simply revised."
This would involve creating new tablets. The work involved would be rewriting the text on new clay tablets and then baking them.
The amount of work involved would be immense to change 100's or 1,000's of records.
Wow. Thanks. You know, I hadn't really thought about that. Good point. So I'm wondering if these tablets were exceptional. I mean, if this was a stable family business over the years that was seen as an opportunity to substantiate the reduced Babylonian timeline.
But there is something we can look into. That is, whether these tablets show contemporary recording over the years which might reflect slight and gradual changes in writing style, versus a very consistent writing style, perhaps that can be dated to a later period. That's the case with the Nabonidus Chronicle, the Cyrus Cylinder and the Babylonian Chronicle, which all sport the very neat style of a smaller script typical of the Persian Period, thus we know from the writing style the documents were "copied" during the Persian Period, not that the Babylonian Chronicle itself even mentions the year it was "copied" (i.e. year 22 of Darius (II)).
So we can get some further input here. We will know they were all recopied and revised if the writing style belongs to a later period rather than varing over those centuries. So if you can find graphics of some of these tablets we can compare them. Maybe the writing style has already been commented on.
But as far as the monumental task of recopying all those texts goes, if the Persian government thought it was worth it, they could have easily done it. For instance, how many tablets do you think could be copied by one copyist in a day? 50, 100? If ten copyists were assigned to recopy and change these texts then it wouldn't really take that long. Remember the Persians were in a cold war with Greece and they were desperate to try to cover their ploy of Xerxes faking his own death and claiming to be his own son. So if the Egibi business records were thought to provide convincing background, then the Persian government certainly had the means to recopy these texts. They had already recopied all the critical palace documents as mentioned above, so why not these? Actually, it think it is a matter of budget as well. Question is, could they afford it? Answer is yes. They afforded carving out a new extra rock tomb at Naqshi-Rustam for "Xerxes." Xerxes is buried out of order, but it's out there to fool people.
However, now that you mention it, this was a minor project compared to what took place during the Seleucid Era with the astronomical texts. After the VAT4956 was created, someone figured out that changing the lunar times could help preserve some of the original astronomical events that had coincidental match-up in the new timeline. So what they did was create thousands of astronomical texts with predicted eclipse events that were timed to the new distorted eclipse times! Thus they created a pool of documents that seemed to confirm the consistent new times. That must have been a major undertaking; certainly more challenging than copying and redating some business transaction records for this bank. Remember, the Persians are trying to snow job the Greeks, so the more ancient texts reflecting the revised timeline they have that look legit, the more likely they would be believed. If that only meant recopying a few thousand business documents, then that was well worth it. So I would be curious to see by comparison if these are all contemporary or copies. In fact, apparently some are duplicates so clearly there was some recopying.
I'll do a preliminary Google search of these tablets to see what is said. But if you come up with anything specific about them, I'd appreciate it. But also remember, just as you think this project of recopying this many texts is impractical, so would the Greeks. Therefore, that alone would make it worth it. If they thought no one would bother recopying all these texts just to fool them then that alone made it quite worth doing just that.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
LS