A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  (SAA 16 34)

  But Šumaya was not the only of Nabû‐zuqup‐kenu’s grandsons who fell out of favor with Assurbanipal. His cousin, Urdu‐Gula, too, was cold‐shouldered by Assurbanipal, who was now king of Assyria:

  I used to receive gifts from him (= King Esarhaddon), and my name was mentioned among men of good fortune. I used to enjoy generous regular handouts; on occasion he used to give me a mule or an ox, and every year I received a mina or two of silver. [In the days] when my lord was crown prince, I received regular handouts with your (other) exorcists. … Now, succeeding his father, the king my lord has added to the good name he (= Esarhaddon) had established, but I have not been treated in accordance with my deeds. I have suffered as never before and lost spirit. … If it is befitting that established scholars and (their) deputies receive mules, I should be granted a donkey; likewise, oxen are apportioned in the tenth month (December/January) and I too should [receive] an ox! … It is now two years since the two beasts of mine died. I have walked three times to Arba’il and once to Ashur, but has anyone showed me any compassion by taking me by the hand or [leading me] into the presence of the king my lord? Why did the king summon an exorcist from Ekallatum, while I had to take to the desert roads because of people asking me: “Why do you go on foot?” People pass my house, the established (scholars) on sedans, the deputies on carts, the apprentices on mules, and I have to walk! Perhaps the king will say: “He is a son of the country.” The king can ask (anyone): My father (= Adad‐šumu‐uṣur) portioned out 6 homers of farmland with his brother Nabû‐zeru‐lešir. I and my brother received three homers each, and in addition two persons. By the grace of the king my lord I have been gifted (another) five or six people. I have visited the Kidmuru temple (of the goddess Ištar in Kalḫu in order to pray for children) and arranged a banquet, (yet) my wife has embarrassed me: for five years (she has been) neither dead nor alive (i.e. no pregnancy, not even a stillbirth), and I have no son. This year three women have fallen to me. But I have no farm workers, no farm equipment, no farm. … I cannot (even) afford a pair of sandals or the wages of a tailor, I have no spare suit of clothes, and I have incurred debts of almost six minas of silver, plus the interest. Also, I am of advanced years and they say: “Once you have reached old age, who will support you?”

  (SAA 10 294)

  Urdu‐Gula professes to be ashamed of the way he had to live. With only a small plot of land and servants in short supply, without a suitable means of transport, and forced to wear old clothes, he is the laughingstock of the scholars who enjoy the king’s favor, or so he imagines. Of course, although his situation was a far cry from the royal confidant Šulmu‐šarri’s wealthy circumstances, Urdu‐Gula was certainly not a poor man. But being accustomed to a more affluent situation had led him to incur debts of (at least) three times his former annual income at court. He bitterly laments the loss of the days when King Esarhaddon favored him and implores Assurbanipal to accept him back into the royal entourage, which would, of course, have remedied his financial problems quickly. Any of his contemporaries could have related to his despair in lacking a son and heir (which he blames on his barren wife) and the resulting worry about who would take care of him in old age. If the sacrifices to the goddess Ištar continued to fail to yield results, and his wife’s previous failure to become pregnant would make this seem likely, Urdu‐Gula would probably have resolved this increasingly urgent problem by adopting a suitable boy (Radner 2004: 897). In the context of this letter, Urdu‐Gula clearly expects this line of argument to prompt Assurbanipal to step in and offer to take care of him.

  Why did these two men, despite their education and their excellent pedigree, not enjoy the privileged position at court, with all of the associated material benefits, which they clearly expected to be rightly theirs? During Esarhaddon’s reign, the Assyrian court saw the arrival of highly qualified scholars from Babylonia (see SAA 10 160) and Egypt (Radner 2009: 223), many of whom were accepted into the royal entourage. The competition for the king’s favor among the members of the Assyrian scholarly establishment was suddenly fiercer than ever. Men like Šumaya and Urdu‐Gula, who grew up expecting to succeed in their ancestors’ footsteps and find relatively easy acceptance into the royal entourage, were bitterly disappointed – they were victims of the Assyrian resettlement strategy, albeit in a very different way than the woman Nanaya‐ila’i, whom we shall discuss next.

  An enslaved war captive

  During most of the reign of Assurbanipal, Assyria was in a permanent state of war with the kingdom of Elam and, between 664 and 648 BCE, frequently invaded and plundered the enemy’s territory. A legal text from Ashur (edited and discussed by Faist 2009; the date is lost) documents the fate of one woman and her daughter, who were caught up in the war and taken from Elam to Assyria as war captives. In the document recording their sale for one mina of silver, an average price for the mid seventh century BCE, the women are described as “booty from Elam whom the king has given to Libbi‐ali (= city of Ashur).” In the aftermath of a battle, the spoils, including human captives, were distributed among the victors according to established conventions. In a letter to the governor of Kalḫu (CTN 2 194) under Tiglath‐pileser III, his representative reported that he selected thirty captives after one battle in Babylonia and ten more after another. The further fortunes of such prisoners of war are normally not recorded in our sources and the case of the Elamite captives, Nanaya‐ila’i and her young daughter, is therefore a very rare concrete example concerning the effects of war on women (Kuhrt 2001).

  The contract’s date is lost, but it is likely that the woman and her child were snatched during the sack of Susa in 646 BCE, when enormous amounts of booty were captured. After they reached Ashur as part of the booty contingent reserved for that city, our text documents that Nanaya‐ila’i and her daughter were sold by ten men, who owned them jointly, to one Mannu‐ki‐Aššur. The ten sellers, identified by name and profession, were a diverse group of temple craftsmen, including a baker, a cook, a weaver, a goldsmith, an ironsmith, and a shepherd. Although they were, of course, all affiliates of the Assur temple, they had little in common otherwise. However, since there are ten of them and military matters link them to the captives from Elam, we may assume that they constituted (part of) a unit (kiṣru, literally “knot”) and were jointly responsible for fulfilling their work obligations to the state, including military service (Postgate 2007: 344–5). If this hypothesis is accepted, then it is feasible that they participated as a group in one of the military campaigns against Elam, as part of the contingent from Ashur, and received the Elamite woman and her young daughter as their joint reward from among the battle spoils reserved for Ashur. Nanaya‐ila’i would have received her Akkadian name (“The goddess Nanaya is my deity”) only after she had come into Assyrian captivity. Her name was a deliberate reference to the fact that Assurbanipal’s conquest of Elam had also resulted in the celebrated repatriation of an ancient cult statue of Nanaya, which had been abducted over a millennium ago to Elam (van Koppen 2013: 380). As owning the slaves jointly was of limited practical use to the individual men, selling them and dividing the proceeds was the obvious solution. We must therefore assume that the sale took place soon after the sack of Susa and once the Elamite women had arrived in Ashur.

  Whatever their original social background in Elam, Nanaya‐ila’i and her daughter would have spent the rest of their lives as domestic slaves, contributing to the everyday running of the household of their master by grinding flour, baking, cooking, and cleaning or, if they were gifted, adding to the household’s prosperity by spinning wool and weaving textiles that could be sold at a profit. On the whole, their existence would have been a quiet one, undoubtedly a relief after the shock of their wartime abduction to Assyria. But, unless she died early, e.g. during childbirth, as happened so frequently, Nanaya‐ila’i’s daughter would have had to witness another invasion, the conquest of Ashur in 614 BCE, and she may well have been claimed as booty for a seco
nd time in her life, this time by the Median army.

  The bon‐vivants of Ashur

  With our final sketch, we stay in Ashur and, in an attempt to link the activities of the city’s inhabitants in the seventh century BCE to the well‐documented trading enterprises of their remote ancestors in the Old Assyrian Period (see Chapter 4), I have chosen a man called Duri‐Aššur as the object of our attention: he was the head of a trading firm based at Ashur and resided in a generously‐appointed building offering about 150 meters2 of living space. While this building was tiny compared to Šulmu‐šarri’s gigantic Dur‐Katlimmu mansion, in the context of the densely built‐up city of Ashur, this is a house of average size.1 We can assume that the Elamite war captive, Nanaya‐ila’i, and her daughter lived in a household of similar size. Duri‐Aššur’s firm was one of many private trading companies operating in Ashur. A family of Western Iranian origin was very active in the same period (Radner 2007b: 196–7), and it is very likely that their members exploited their roots in Iran for their commercial dealings.

  As we learn from the letters and lists found in his private archive (Radner 2016), Duri‐Aššur organized trading ventures into the northern regions of Assyria with three partners (“brothers”) in the period of 651–614 BCE; that is, until the Medes conquered the city of Ashur. Some of his letters had not yet been opened when Duri‐Aššur’s house went up in flames. The ensuing wars certainly terminated the firm’s activities – and we can, of course, assume that trade in general, on a large geographical scale, was badly affected during the next decade while the spoils from the Assyrian empire were gradually divided up between the marauding Babylonian, Median, and Egyptian armies.

  Throughout the period that his business flourished, during the reign of Assurbanipal and his successors, Duri‐Aššur seems to have stayed in the city of Ashur while his partners did the traveling in order to arrange and to oversee their joint business activities. Duri‐Aššur and his partners employed four agents as caravan leaders, and these men conducted three trips a year, leading a group of donkeys upstream along the Tigris River with merchandise from Ashur that included exclusive garments, like hats and shoes, and textiles, which also served as packing material for the supplies and the silver funds. One letter names Zamaḫu in the Jebel Sinjar as a destination, a city famous for its wines. Zamaḫu may have been the usual destination of Duri‐Aššur’s caravans – why vary the route if one had a reliable network of suppliers and business partners in one place? Once the caravan had reached its destination, everything was sold, including the donkeys, and Duri‐Aššur’s agents bought wine from the proceeds and the funds that they had brought with them. Among the well‐heeled inhabitants of Ashur, wine drinking was popular and widespread in the seventh century BCE. Wine was a luxury item that remained prestigious and expensive, even after the integration of wine‐producing regions along the Taurus and Zagros mountain ranges into the Assyrian empire had allowed its consumption to spread beyond royal banquets and temple ceremonies (Powell 1996: 118–21). The wine that Duri‐Aššur’s agents bought was poured into animal skins (mostly made of sheep and goat skin, only exceptionally of cattle hides) and these wineskins were bound together with wooden beams in order to create rafts for the return journey to Ashur on the Tigris River. This was the best possible approach to the transport of wine; on the one hand, the river water kept the wine cool and prevented it from spoiling and, on the other, all components of this means of transport constituted valuable merchandise in Ashur and could be sold off – the merchants could sell not only the wineskins but also the logs, which were needed as building material in the forestless Ashur.

  Duri‐Aššur and his partners accepted investments. Although some investors contributed substantial sums of money to their trading funds, most of the amounts invested were small, sometimes just a fraction of a shekel of silver. Duri‐Aššur had a loyal customer base, as most investors invested in several trading missions. The lists in Duri‐Aššur’s archive collect information about the investors and their investments and usually also give family affiliations and professional titles. This allows for a glimpse into the composition of Ashur’s population in the late seventh century BCE: it was comprised mostly of craftsmen and administrative personnel in the service of the temple of Assur, but also of city officials and affiliates of the households of members of the royal family who maintained residences at Ashur. A large number of women invested in Duri‐Aššur’s enterprises, most of whom are identified as Egyptian. There were also a few Egyptian men among Duri‐Aššur’s investors. The presence of Egyptians in the lists is not at all surprising given that an Egyptian family lived right next to Duri‐Aššur, one of many families that were settled into the city as highly valued specialists after the conquest of Thebes and Memphis in 671 BCE (Radner 2009: 225). But why so many women? In Egypt, women routinely conducted business independently, as contract partners equal before the law, unlike in Assyria, where women were normally represented by male relatives. The evidence from Duri‐Aššur’s archive would seem to indicate that, even decades after their relocation to Assyria, Egyptian women continued to enjoy this freedom in their new domicile.

  Abbreviations

  CTN

  = Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud, 5 volumes, London: The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1972–2001.

  SAA

  = S. Parpola (ed.), State Archives of Assyria, 19 volumes published, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press 1987–.

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