A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

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  The NA legal system reflects, but also expands to an unprecedented degree, the basic institutional cornerstones carried down from the MA age such as the divine choice of the Assyrian king for the concrete exercise of authority in peace and war, through a combination of royal ideology, religious doctrines, and visual and textual propaganda (Holloway 2002). The exercise of justice was part and parcel of the duties of the omniscient, omnipotent, and ever‐righteous Assyrian ruler, although he could, in his turn, be answerable to the gods in case of malfeasance, even with serious repercussions on his kingdom. A political‐literary text of the time makes this clear: “if the king does not heed justice, his people will be thrown into chaos and his land will be devastated” (Lambert 1960: 112). With these tenets, the NA period presents a major shift in international relations and in the legal instruments used for their regulation (Parpola 2003; Fales 2008). With the constitution of the NA empire, the Near East became a mono‐centric political and ideological entity, bordered by an immense periphery of “otherness,” which official ideology presented as inferior in all aspects – from merely barbaric to explicitly sinful – and thus deserving of being drawn by force within the “civilizing” horizon of the Assyrian state.

  In practice, the king’s rule was supported in the capital and throughout the empire by an elite class, formed by native Assyrians and an Assyrianized nobility from the subordinate states (Parpola 2003). The totality of male officials was at times subdivided between “bearded men” (ša ziqni) and eunuchs (ša rēši: Deller 1997); while the status of the latter, already attested in the MA period (see below, Middle Assyrian Legal Practices), is still not totally clear in its implications, both types of courtiers are attested at all levels of society, as also visible in the pictorial record (palace bas‐reliefs on stone; ivory statuettes or carvings). In general, the high‐ranking officials of the NA state (whether at the provincial, municipal, or temple level) were appointed by the king – at times after recourse to divinatory practices. Lower‐level ranks were filled in by members of the palace bureaucracy, but approval by the king was occasionally requested. A series of seven officials, the “Grandees” (rabûte), whose titles reflect older palatial staff professions, were closest to the king, perhaps even forming a specific “cabinet”; some of them were at the same time in charge of provinces or of specific army units, formed by recruits or by professionals (Parpola 1995; Mattila 2000).

  Written and pictorial evidence alike testifies to the multiplicity of women of various ranks and functions within the royal palaces; however, interestingly enough, polygamy was not a frequent practice in NA society, differently from the OA and MA periods (Radner 2003: 895). Beside the chosen or preferred wife of the king, who bore the title sēgallu, literally “woman of the palace,” secondary queens could be present, as demonstrated by the inscriptions accompanying the richly furnished ninth‐ and eighth.‐century queens’ tombs at Kalḫu (Oates and Oates 2001: 80–8). The royal court also lodged noble ladies of Assyrian and foreign origin as honored guests or hostages, and entire harems of defeated foreign rulers (Parpola 2012). Life in the royal harem (bēt isāte) was under the official jurisdiction of the Queen, as already known from the MA harem edicts; she was aided by a “harem manageress” (šakintu), who could rise in rank from that of a mere sekretu, “harem woman,” and had female and eunuch servants, plus a female deputy, at her command. A text from Nineveh listing thirteen šakintus with their workplaces indicates that royal harems were present not only in different palaces of the capital, but also in various provincial cities, and a recently discovered archive of a šakintu in the city of Tušḫan (Parpola 2008) confirms the veracity of the list.

  The authority in the individual provinces was entrusted to governors (bēl pāhete) and their subordinates, who were responsible for collecting taxes and other dues from their territories, as well as for supplying conscripts from the army and laborers for public works, with their apparel and animals. Within the provinces, the status of landed property could differ widely. Some prebendary lands (ma’uttu) accompanied governorships or other high‐ranking functions – their proceeds going in a fixed share to the state, the remainder to the office‐holder. Originally prebendary assignations could have given rise to veritable “households” – bētu – of the royal family, which in the seventh century comprised real estate, palatial residences, and civilian and military personnel. Newly conquered or barren land belonged to the state, which could shift around communities of deportees or of craftsmen to occupy it, whereas in the older areas of Assyrian conquest (between or around the Twin Rivers) private ownership was widespread, showing historical “waves” of new assignments by the Crown or the governors – through grants or other measures – and their subsequent re‐absorption through buyouts of impoverished landowners by high‐ranking military and bureaucrats. Thus, in the Jezirah, official texts from the ninth century indicate a thrust toward new colonization of steppelands through the creation of many hamlets, whereas letters and deeds of the seventh century from the same general area reveal a landscape of vast rural estates, formed by multiple landed holdings scattered here and there in a “leopard's‐skin” pattern, and often manned by groups of glebae adscripti drawn from deportations or debt‐enslavement. Statistical studies further suggest that these families of rural “serfs” could have been artificially subdivided, with some females being destined to household slavery (Fales 2009–10).

  Cities and their hinterlands were entrusted to the mayor (ḫazannu) and the city overseer (ša muḫḫi āli), perhaps chosen from the elders of the community. While cities do not seem to have owned land, they tended to underscore their jurisdiction over landed property in their environs, as may be seen from the seals of city officials on some sale documents (Klengel‐Brandt and Radner 1997). Temples could own land, usually at close range, in order to provide offerings for the gods (Radner 2003: 898–9).

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  Such a ramified bureaucratic apparatus, which was consistently flanked by military contingents (especially of non‐Assyrian auxiliaries, such as the Itueans and Gurreans of nomadic origin, who operated as military police or the like), had the basic function of maintaining law and order in the increasingly vast territories under Assyrian control/domination. On the other hand, the NA letters relate of many a difficulty in law enforcement throughout the provinces, caused by insurrections of local communities or by individual acts of outright misdemeanor, from smuggling to larceny of commodities and taxes to collective flight from servile conditions in the countryside. Even greater problems of security could arise from unwarranted penetrations of foreign groups – such as marauding Arabs during the reign of Sargon II (722–705) – within the confines of the land, which was guarded by a strategically located but altogether fragile mesh of fortified outposts (Parker 2001; Fales 2002). Finally, there are abundant hints from letters that corruption was widespread both in urban and rural settings, with accounts of “gratuities” and bribes received, of prevarications, and personal defamations occurring at many levels of the civilian bureaucracy, or between Assyrians and foreigners. As a remedy to all this, a policy of universal “vigilance” (maṣṣartu) was imposed on all the king’s subjects regarding any untoward act or behavior, to be reported posthaste to superiors and/or to the king himself – with the ensuing creation of a climate of widespread suspicion and denunciation, both at the royal court and in the provinces, especially during the reign of Esarhaddon (Fales 2011).

  The end, when it came, was a true catastrophe (Liverani 2008), and the territorially over‐extended Assyrian empire, in which moreover areas of indirect dominion had grown exponentially, suffered a swift political collapse. But recent discoveries at Dur‐Katlimmu have shown that – counter to the traditional belief that the Assyrian heartland was punitively left in utter abandonment and socio‐economic destitution by the new Chaldean rulership – not only life went on in the old provinces, but even local business activity continued, with the aid of scribes trained in th
e Assyrian/Aramaic script and legal formulary, whose sole new imposition was to adopt the Babylonian dating system (Kühne et al. 1993).

  Old Assyrian Legal Practices

  Context and sources

  Information on OA administration and legislation is still quite scarce from the city‐state of Ashur itself, since the older archeological layers were left almost untapped during the main excavations on the site by Walter Andrae (1903–13). Legal materials in the language and script of the OA period thus stem primarily from the commercial entrepôt (kārum) of the city of Kaniš (present‐day Kültepe near Kayseri), some 1000 kilometers northwest of Ashur, which constituted the administrative hub of a network of Assyrian trading establishments (including smaller ones called wabartum) spread across southern, and even central, Anatolia (cf. Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 153–79; Barjamovic 2011). Excavations at Kaniš have yielded some 20,000 texts dating to ca. 1950–1840 (kārum level II), and ca. 250 more of a slightly later date (early 18th century; level Ib), also comprising some texts from other Anatolian commercial outposts – most notably Ḫattuša, later to become the Hittite capital. The uneven distribution of sources has led modern scholars to various attempts at interpretation, all of which have to remain preliminary in view of a large number of still unpublished texts (Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 68–75).

  In sum, the OA period has brought down to us a very rich, but at the same time unbalanced, documentation. The legal dealings of the Assyrian community at Kaniš are attested in private archives of tablets often written by four or five generations of traders, stored in homogeneous lots in baskets, boxes, or jars within locked rooms, and comprising both business correspondence (Michel 2008) and legal deeds (Ulshöfer 1995). These documents essentially bear on matters of Assyrian commercial activity abroad (see the case study below), and shed only indirect light on the legal institutions of the capital Ashur, whence the year‐round commercial traffic by donkey‐driven caravans originated. In addition, a few hundred documents which concern the commercial and private dealings of the indigenous population of Kaniš – in the main of Hittite stock, as indicated by personal names (Michel 2001: 40) – are testimonials for a decidedly non‐Assyrian legal tradition.

  Organs of legislation

  The city of Ashur (dubbed ālum, i.e. “the City” par excellence) had its legal organs in the assembly of its citizens (puḫrum), in the king (rubāʼum, “prince,” at times also bēlum, “lord”), who was the chief magistrate, as head and executive officer of the assembly itself, and in the yearly appointed eponym (līmum), who was possibly drawn from the members of the main kinship groups of the city (Larsen 1976, 2000; list in Veenhof 2003b). These three institutional bodies had totally different destinies after the OA period: the first one disappears from the written record, the second one underwent a radical shift in its functions and in its relation to the god Assur, while the third – but overall most elusive – one survived intact until the very end of Assyrian history.

  The Ashur assembly was not only the highest judicial authority both for the city‐state and for its foreign dependencies – in the form of a court of law – but it was also responsible for operational decisions and for rules of general policy affecting the trade circuit, either as a comprehensive body or through specifically appointed committees. The legal impact of the assembly may be deduced from verdicts in the name of “the City” (or at times of “the City and the lord”) regarding matters as diverse as payments of debts, compensation for losses during caravan trips, and provisions upon the death of traders. These verdicts became official rulings, in the form of sealed letters (awāt ālim) sent to the kārum through messengers (“envoys of the City”).

  No law code from this period has been retrieved, but random quotes and references in letters and verdicts mentioning “the words written on the stela” allow us to surmise that forms of statutory law existed and were even of binding value, in contrast to the situation in Babylonia; however, it is still unclear whether, and to what extent, such “words” reflected the powers of the assembly and/or of the king. Quite uncertain, moreover, is the assembly’s size, the social status of its members (who presumably came from the main merchant families of the city), and its inner subdivision by age/power groups – although the “Elders,” a body particularly well attested in Babylonia (Démare‐Lafont 2011: 340–1), certainly formed part of it – as is the process of decision‐making in its midst. The meetings of the assembly seem to have taken place in the general area of the Assur temple; this location is not totally surprising, since the religious and administrative personnel of the sanctuary was actively involved in commercial matters, not only as recipients of precious votive gifts, but also as lenders of substantial sums to the merchants’ establishments, with the ensuing profits.

  On the other hand, the practical aspects of trade, in which Ashur acted as a crucial hub of import and export, were centered on a specific building, the “City Hall” (bīt ālim). Here the eponym had his office and exercised his political and social power – possibly in some counterbalance to the prerogatives of the king – by collecting and redistributing assets in silver (taxes, fees, debts, etc.) owed by the traders to the caravan‐owners or to the City (Dercksen 2004: 76–95). Not by chance, the most ancient and most hallowed legal instrument/symbol of the city‐state, the cylinder seal of the god Assur himself – which we know to have been preserved with reverence down to the seventh century – was kept in this building, of major administrative importance at least until MA times (Larsen 1976: 156, 193; George 1986: 141; see also the Neo‐Assyrian case study below).

  There is also evidence for an assembly of the merchants based in the kārum of Kaniš itself, which could issue circular notices to the minor commercial outposts in Anatolia, and receive legal appeals from them. Rules for the convening and decision‐making of the Kaniš assembly – obviously placed at a subordinate level to the puḫrum of Ashur – are preserved in three very fragmentary tablets, known as “statutes” of the entrepôt (Larsen 1976: 282–338); they deal with the settling of accounts and with the passing of verdicts. From these and other texts we also learn that the kārum assembly had a secretary, its own archives, and legal and administrative headquarters in a specific building called “sacred precinct” near the “gate of the god” (Assur), where oaths were taken by swearing on the “dagger of the god” – a symbolically binding object presumably deposited within the local temple, also known from Babylonian juridical contexts (Holloway 2002: 167–9).

  Case study: Litigation in a mercantile society

  Many of the legal practices directing the Assyrian merchants in their business dealings among themselves, or with individuals/authorities back home at Ashur, or finally with the Anatolians, may be made out in some detail from the written evidence from Kaniš. The private legal documents mainly concern actions tied to commercial credit or loans, and the ensuing complications; collective stipulations regarding the various phases and aspects of Assyrian‐Anatolian commerce are also attested. However, the traders’ archives also included contracts of a non‐commercial nature, on the purchase of houses and slaves in the Kaniš area or pertaining to family law. As for the thousands of business letters, they represent an equally relevant source of information on OA jurisprudence, since they offer crucial data not only on commercial law (i.e. on the commodities involved and on the procedures and legal devices employed) but also on questions of jurisdiction in lawsuits, by quoting statements, appeals, verdicts, and the rulings provided by the “tablets of the City” (Veenhof 2003: 433–4). The case study presented here for OA law thus regards litigation, arbitration, and their commercial implications, which were particularly significant to the merchants involved in view of the constraints of time and money on business (Démare‐Lafont 2011: 344).

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  The procedure for litigation (Veenhof 2003: 441–7) could be conducted by the merchants themselves or by the kārum as a collective plaintiff; the court of law could be the entrepôt assembly or, depending on the case,
the main puḫrum in Ashur. The first stage was that the plaintiff would sue, or “seize the hem” of the defendant’s garment, which was the symbolic act that bound the latter to go through judgment. This was followed by similar “seizures” of a judge and of witnesses – all such actions being recorded under oaths sworn by the god Assur (see Ponchia 2009: 240–1, with previous literature). An “attorney” (rābiṣum) could be hired by the plaintiff to “win his case,” and might even be sent off from Ashur to Anatolia with the “tablet of the City” to direct the dispute on behalf of the latter, with travel expenses and food being added to his professional wages. Examination of evidence was of paramount importance: not only was prior written documentation (if still legally valid) collected and read, but witnesses were also summoned and heard in testimony. Litigation verdicts by the court could be provisional or conclusive; they tended toward an agreement between the parties, or toward monetary sanctions for the defendant. An exceptional ruling against illicit trading in gold hints at the death penalty, but there were opportunities to appeal to a higher court.

  Litigation cases/verdicts, or even straightforward contracts, help to shed an indirect, but highly informative, light on the complex mechanisms of Assyrian commercial procedures (Veenhof 2003a: 473–6). The merchant firms based at Ashur hired carriers who were entrusted with the transport of merchandise and monetary assets by caravan to and from Anatolia, and could even be retained on a long‐term basis, thus becoming employees of the firms themselves. As “pay,” but also as obligation for his service, the carrier received an interest‐free silver loan (bēʼūlātum) with which he could buy textiles to sell in Anatolia for his own profit; interest was applied to the loan only in case of breach of contract. Caravan personnel was entrusted with the merchandise to be shipped abroad by means of specific contracts transacted before witnesses, obviously of primary importance in case of judicial outcomes. On their part, the merchants themselves required secure places to deposit documents, silver, and even merchandise when they were away or traveling: the safekeeping of such valuables in friends’ or colleagues’ houses (at times under seal) could be recorded through contracts with witnesses. Forms of contractual partnership between trade entrepreneurs could be long‐ or short‐term, and could imply a full pooling of capital and labor, with the ensuing rules on sharing gains and losses: mutual representation, access to all debt‐notes and depositions for the purpose of facing each other’s outstanding debts, reciprocal investments both in Assyria and Anatolia, and the formal clearance of accounts to obtain individual shares of the profits, were all accounted for. A vaster commercial venture, entailing several members, was called ellutum (“company” or “caravan”): costs and losses were shared proportionally, with a minimal guaranteed share of the profits technically designated as “one third.”