A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  The highest segment of the society was constituted by a small upper class. Its members were mainly recruited from long‐established large families, the so‐called “houses” (Jakob 2003: 23174), and occupied all of the important offices within the administration. The categories of “public” and “private” were not clearly separated. Administrative documents have been found with contracts, loans, and letters, recording both the family’s private activities and the obligations of public office (Postgate 1988). The officials of the crown occasionally used the resources of the palace that were placed in their responsibility to generate private profits (Jakob 2003: 52). This can be proven by a document that records the declaration of a certain Aššur‐iddin, son of Urad‐ilane, otherwise known as an important official, a “representative of the king” (qēpu ša šarre). He states in this text that he did not use royal workmen for private purposes. The text clearly shows that such behavior would have been treated as treason, declaring: “If Aššur‐iddin (had really done what he has been accused of), he would have hated the life of the king, his lord” (Brinkman and Donbaz 1985: 86). On the other hand, officials had to allot portions of their own funds to public institutions if asked to do so (Jakob 2003: 52; 181).

  The capital required for this came from several sources. Most importantly, high officials were provided with rural estates, often fortified farmstead of considerable size that were equipped with a reasonable workforce of plowmen and harvesters and were called dunnu (see Wiggermann 2000). There were several possibilities for additional income. Firstly, members of the upper class could utilize their stocks to give out loans to private individuals. The conditions of such agreements were often very unfavorable to the debtor. The debtor had to pay an interest of up to 100 percent in addition to the delivery of further commodities (sheep, vessels) and services (additional harvesters), generally during harvest time, when all available workers were actually needed on the field(s) of the debtor (Jakob 2003: 344ff.). Secondly, officials of the state administration were allowed to receive a “gift” (šulmānu) from private persons, in exchange for their promise to examine requests that had been submitted to the administration. The amount of this “legal bribe” was recorded on a tablet, followed by a sentence such as: “He shall examine his case (and then) receive his gift” and witnessed by a scribe (Jakob 2003: 52f.).

  Those who did not belong to the rather small upper class could hope for the king’s gift of mercy (the so‐called rīmuttu; see ibid.: 51f.), but, in general, had to content themselves with a much lower standard of living. They did not constitute a homogeneous social class. The group closest to the upper class consisted of free men (a’ īlu) who likewise received allotments of land for performing official duties (see above, “Recruitment and Labor Administration”), but could not live on them alone due to the small size of these lots. In contrast, the šiluḫlu (ibid.: 39–42) did not have access to land ownership and were dependent on what they received from the state administration (food supplies and clothes; cf. below, “The Middle Assyrian Family”). The designation of this group is derived from the Hurrian šelluḫli, which refers to a free man who enters the service of another one by his own initiative, receiving rations and clothes in return. He was allowed to withdraw from the contract of employment by providing a substitute to fulfill his obligations. It still cannot be determined with certainty whether or not the Middle Assyrian šiluḫlu had originally possessed similar rights. Likewise, we cannot determine how they came into the situation reflected in our sources. It seems probable that the šiluḫlu were recruited, at least partially, from prisoners of war and deportees.

  The main field of employment of the šiluḫlu seems to have been the agricultural sector. Here, they were highly dependent upon their respective employers, but they were not necessarily the latter’s property. This can be proved by several documents from Ashur regarding a hereditary division (ibid.: 279–81). In these documents, it is recorded that nearly one thousand šiluḫlu, formerly the dependants of the late Šamaš‐aḫa‐iddina, were divided amongst at least three sons. Royal representatives were responsible for carrying out this procedure. At a certain point, the king himself was involved in detaching a small contingent from the total amount in order to assign it to another person whose affiliation to Šamaš‐aḫa‐iddina’s family remains unclear to us. Hence it seems that the šiluḫlu were once recruited from prisoners of war or deportees and then transferred from the state administration to an official, Šamaš‐aḫa‐iddina, with an allotment of land. These people continued to be considered state property so that the king could assign them to whomever it seemed appropriate for him to do so.

  Similar to šiluḫlu, the term “village resident” (ālāyû) denotes a person who was dependent on the owner of the land (an individual or the palace) on which he lived (see CAD A I, 391). The “Middle Assyrian Laws” (MAL § 45) distinguish the “village resident” from the ālik ilke (see above, “Recruitment and Labor Administration”) on the one hand, and the hupšu on the other. The evidence from other periods of ancient Near Eastern history and regions outside of Assyria suggests that the latter were also members of a lower social class. They are often mentioned in military contexts, inter alia, in an inscription of Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE; RIMA 3, A.0.102.5 v 3). What is referred to here is the army of the Babylonian usurper Marduk‐bel‐usati. Strangely enough, within the tākultu ritual, images of ḫupšu people are mentioned immediately after statues of kings and princes (Meinhold 2009: 414f.; 422).

  The Middle Assyrian Family

  Marriage was not left to the prospective spouses but was, rather, negotiated between both families involved. This matter is treated in the “Middle Assyrian Laws” (MAL §48 and passim; see Lafont 2003: 535–8). Further information about the living conditions of families in the Middle Assyrian period can be derived from the census and ration lists of the administration.

  A small‐sized family was the norm (Freydank 1980: 101; Jakob 2009: 97–105). Polygamy was permitted among the Assyrians (MAL § 41), as well as amongst Hurrian and Elamite deportees, but was by no means the rule. Additionally, servants are attested as members of these households, either brought directly from their place of origin or allocated to the household by the Assyrian administration.

  In the aforementioned lists, individual members of a family are classified by sex and age and and related to the head of the household. According to the principle whereby all adults were obligated to perform public work in return for rations and other allotments, men were, moreover, referred to with their particular professions, whereas their wives were normally designated simply as “workers” (ša šipre). If there was no male head of household alive, his widow could represent the household in his place (Freydank 1980: 96f.; cf. below MAL § 46). For children, there was a stepped system of age groups. This classification system helped calculate the individual rations of grain a person received each month:

  Adult man 3 sūtu (1 sūtu ≈ 8 liters; cf. RlA 7, 501f.)

  Adult woman 2 sūtu

  Apprentice (talmīdu/talmittu) 1.5 sūtu

  Young child (tari’u/tarītu) 1.25 sūtu

  Weaned child (pirsu/pirsatu) 1 sūtu

  Suckling (ša irte) 0.75 sūtu

  Detailed information about the social position of women can be taken from Tablet A of the “Middle Assyrian Laws” (Roth 1995: 153ff.), although there is much uncertainty among scholars as to whether these regulations ever had direct legal force. The laws refer to various kinds of criminal offences, especially sex crimes, and marital law. In the street, honest women, including wives and widows, were obligated to wear a veil. The same is true for the “concubine” (esertu) while she was accompanying her mistress (MAL § 40). While a qadiltu priestess (see Jakob 2003: 537–9) was allowed to be veiled when she was married, this was always prohibited for prostitutes (ḫarīmtu) and slave women. The connection between veil and marriage is revealed in MAL § 41: “If a man veils his concubine in public by declaring: ‘she is my wife,’
this woman will be his wife.” The children of a concubine were lower in rank than the descendants of a wife, but they could inherit if the marriage of the latter remained childless. The care for widows is regulated by MAL § 46 and depended on their status (first or second wife) and the existence of children of their own.

  MAL § 45 regulates what was to be done in case a woman was married and, later, her husband was taken prisoner of war. First, she had to wait for two years. If she had a son or her father‐in‐law was still alive and able to support her, then she received no support from the government. If she was alone and the wife of a free man (aššat a’ īle), she was allowed to claim support from the palace. Provided she had no property (lit. “field and house”) she could make an application to the “judges” (da”ānū), i.e. officials of the crown, who were supposed to help her.

  Ethnic Groups

  As a result of Assyria’s military successes and the subsequent deportations, contacts between the inhabitants of the Assyrian heartland and foreign ethnic groups grew closer. Foreigners brought not only their manpower, but also their cultural traditions (Jakob 2005).

  Due to Assyria’s concentration on its expansion into Syria and into the regions north and northeast of the Assyrian heartland during the 13th century BCE, Hurrian people (šubri’u) formed the largest group amongst the deportees. Following the Babylonian campaigns of Tukulti‐Ninurta I, many inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia, referred to as “Kassites” by the Assyrian administration, came to Assyria. It seems that most of them held inferior positions in Assyrian society. They were employed, for instance, for construction projects of the crown, especially for building palaces and sanctuaries in the Assyrian capital. Some people from abroad managed to assume more prominent positions. Shalmaneser I took a selection of young men from Urartu to enter his service at the royal court (RIMA 1, A.0.77.1:42–4), whereas his son Tukulti‐Ninurta recruited bowmen from among Hurrian and Elamite deportees for the army (Postgate 2008: 86‐88; Jakob 2009: 97–103).

  The relationship to non‐sedentary groups was inconsistent. While Aramaean Aḫlamu nomads appear as enemies in the royal inscriptions of Shalmaneser I, the Suti’u were later appreciated as trading partners or scouts (Jakob 2009: 18). The onomasticon of the late 11th century BCE indicates social changes that had taken place by then. Even though several earlier kings had boasted that they had succeeded in defeating the Aramaeans decisively, many Arameaens had managed to settle and were now well established within the kingdom of Assyria.

  Abbreviations

  KAR

  = E. Ebeling, Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiösen Inhalts, 2 volumes, Leipzig: 1915–23.

  MARV

  = H. Freydank et al., Mittelassyrische Rechtsurkunden und Verwaltungstexte, Berlin, Saarbrücken 1976–.

  RIMA

  = A. K. Grayson, The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods, 3 volumes, Toronto: Toronto University Press 1987–96.

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