the state and its subjects under the neo-babylonian...

Imperium and Officium Working Papers (IOWP)

The state and its subjects under the Neo-Babylonian empire

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August 2014 Michael Jursa (University of Vienna, Department of Oriental Studies) Abstract: This paper investigates the forms of state ‘domination’ – ‘Herrschaft’ in a Weberian sense – which are in evidence in Babylonia in the late seventh and the sixth century, under the Neo-Babylonian empire. To the extent that the Neo-Babylonian state can be seen as representative of the other Near Eastern empires of the Iron Age, what is said here has a wider application, other points that are made are valid for the Neo-Babylonian period only.

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Martina Schmidl 1 The state and its subjects under the Neo-Babylonian empire Michael Jursa (Vienna) 1. Introduction This paper interprets the Rencontre’s ‘public and private’ theme as a brief to investigate the forms of state ‘domination’ – ‘Herrschaft’ in a Weberian sense – which are in evidence in Babylonia in the late seventh and the sixth century, under the Neo-Babylonian empire. To the extent that the Neo-Babylonian state can be seen as representative of the other Near Eastern empires of the Iron Age, what is said here has a wider application, other points that are made are valid for the Neo-Babylonian period only.1

For heuristic reasons we will turn to Weber as a point of departure, especially to his fundamental work of conceptualization of social relationships, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.2 Pragmatically framing the questions this paper asks in Weberian terms allows a fruitful typological approach to the social phenomena we are dealing with, and it facilitates the drawing of diachronic and also cross-cultural comparisons. In the most general terms the paper deals with the various forms of domination that can be detected in Babylonia in our period outside the extended household, be it a family household, a larger patrimonial unit such as a clan or tribe, or an institutional household. The state could then be called the sum total of these forms of domination, or of those who exercise them. By the same token, ‘private’ then refers essentially to the subjects of this domination, the Herrschaftssubjekte. It is not useful to interpret the dichotomy ‘private’ vs. ‘state’ as a brief to investigate the relation of the individual to the state. The family or lineage (bītu) is the socio-economic basic ‘unit’ from which a meaningful investigation must depart. On one hand the family or household background largely determines the social position and the socio-economic aspirations of an individual, on the other, an individual is usually subject to domination of one sort or another qua membership in a certain household.3

The Neo-Babylonian empire, like all Iron-Age empires, was a patrimonial bureaucracy, in Weberian terminology, a strongly articulated patrimonial regime: notwithstanding a high degree of professionalism in administration and the importance of rule-bound and standardized procedures, “the position of the patrimonial official derives from his personal submission to the ruler” (Weber 1978: 1030); the division between private and professional affairs of office holders is generally blurred and in no way is the ruler’s power restricted to certain legally defined “competences” (Weber 1978: 220).4

1 This paper is a slightly adapted and expanded version of a talk given at the Rencontre’s opening session. It is based on research conducted under the auspices of the research project S10803 “The Language of Power: Administrative Epistolography in First Millennium BC Babylonia” (2009-2015), which is part of the Research Network ‘Imperium and Officium’ funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Vienna). The Research Network deals with the comparative administrative history of several pre-modern empires. I am happy to acknowledge here the input of my colleagues Heather Baker, Reinhard Pirngruber, Lucian Reinfandt (for early Islamic history), and Sven Tost (Ancient History), as well as of E.E. Payne. Unpublished texts from the British Museum, the Yale Babylonian Collection and the Princeton Theological Seminary are cited by kind permission of the Trustees or Curators of the respective institutions. 2 I use the fifth edition (Weber 1980) of this posthumously (1922) published work; here, however, I refer to Weber 1978, a convenient English translation. See d’Avray 2010a and 2010b for a useful discussion of the import of Weberian historical studies. D’Avray is particularly informative regarding Weber’s concept of historically determined ‘rationalities,’ which is crucial for our context of administrative history. Furthermore, see Scheidel 2013 for a recent discussion of theoretical approaches – Weberian and otherwise – to the problem of the pre-modern state. 3 “Few individuals were simply individuals, as opposed to representatives of larger networks of various kinds,” in the words of P. Crone (Crone 2003: 61), writing on pre-modern societies in general. For our period, see, e.g., Nielsen 2010; Jursa 2010a: 56f., Wunsch (forthcoming). 4 “Appointment by free contract … is essential to modern bureaucracy. Where there is a hierarchical organization with impersonal spheres of competence, but occupied by unfree officials – like slaves or ministeriales – the term ‘patrimonial bureaucracy’ will be used” (Weber 1978: 221). For applications of this concept to other pre-modern empires (Mughal India and China, the latter being Weber’s primary example) see Blake 1979, 1991 and 2011 (Mughals) and, e.g., Huang 2010: 74ff. and Eisenberg 2008: 1ff., also for an

Imperium & Officium: Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom

Times of Change (?) 2 By itself such a labelling does not explain much. By focusing on the attested forms of interaction between the ‘state’ and its subjects, a typology of the agents of this interaction, viz., various ‘officials’ as well as ‘entrepreneurs’ to whom state business was contracted out, can be established. Furthermore, this approach allows an elucidation of the degree of “despotic power” – the degree to which the centralizing force of the state can be imposed on other, competing sources of power – and the degree of “infrastructural power”, i.e., the reach of the state into society, that can be claimed for the Neo-Babylonian empire.5 As a result, the propria of the Neo-Babylonian empire’s nature and of the domination it exercised over its subjects will become clearer.

2. The internal structure of the Neo-Babylonian empire6

The state founded by Nabopolassar was a typical Ancient Near Eastern monarchy of the Iron Age in that conceptually, the supreme political power was vested in the king. The monarch derived his legitimacy from the fact that he acted as the gods’ vicar on earth (e.g., Da Riva 2010a). ‘Official’ texts, especially the huge corpus of royal inscriptions (Da Riva 2008), but also the curriculum of scribal education take pains to project the king’s image in an appropriate way.7 For an urban Babylonian audience, a Neo-Babylonian king wanted to be seen “not as conqueror, administrator, or provider of social justice, but as religious leader and teacher of wisdom” (Beaulieu 2007, 142), while in the recently conquered western parts of the Empire on the other hand, the iconographic language of Babylonian rock reliefs (foremost at Brisa in Lebanon) was based on Neo-Assyrian precedents and thereby implicitly claimed the legitimacy of the Babylonians’ Mesopotamian imperial predecessors (Da Riva 2010b: 179). In view of this impressive array of visual and textual attention given to the king and the monarchy it is easy to forget that in actual fact the monarchy was but one of three distinct elements whose interaction and balance of power defined the structure of the Babylonian state throughout the first millennium BC. The other two elements were the old Babylonian cities of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium and the Chaldean and Aramean tribes, especially those settled east of the Tigris - ethnic subdivisions had important political implications.8 This tripartite structure of the state is demonstrated best by the ‘Hof-Kalender’, an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar of 598 BC (Da Riva 2013; Beaulieu 2013: 33ff.). The text enumerates the chief dignitaries of the state who had symbolically contributed to the construction of a palace. The list names first the chief palace officials, the highest dignitaries of the monarchy; after these, there follow palace officials of secondary rank. Then come the “magnates of the land of Akkad”, headed by the Governor of the Sealand. These are men who are in charge of certain territories in the core of the country and in its periphery. They can be divided into two principal categories: more important are the men in charge of large territories that lie adjacent to the central alluvial plain and are not part of the traditional core of Babylonia: mostly they are leaders of Chaldean and Aramean tribes (IV 21´-33´). Of lesser importance in the list are the officials governing the Babylonian cities in the central alluvium whose name follow after a break: these are royal commissioners on detached duty in provincial cities, city governors and the chief priests of the principal temples of the cities in question. The list is concluded by vassal kings from the Levant.

A majority of the court titles is either of Assyrian origin or at least first attested during the period of the Assyrian domination of Babylonia: the Neo-Babylonian court was built according to an Assyrian

emphasis on the limitations of the ‘bureaucratic’ component in such governmental systems and on the overriding concern with stability (intended as the ruling elite’s and in particular the king’s continued hold on power) rather than with efficiency. 5 Mann 1994: 278f. (based on Mann 1984); see Huang 2010: 76 for a brief discussion of these concepts in the light of Chinese evidence. 6 For a more detailed discussion with further references, see Jursa 2014a. Furthermore, e.g., Beaulieu 2002, 2013; Da Riva 2013; Joannès 2000. 7 See Pongratz-Leisten 2013 for a recent attempt at evaluating the roles of Neo-Assyrian scholars/scribes who were active in the Assyrian king’s entourage in the process of the crafting and disseminating of the royal image on which much of the persuasiveness (from the viewpoint of the elites) of the king’s claim to authority rested. For the Neo-Babylonian state, a similar investigation is not feasible owing to the lack of pertinent sources. 8 For the history of ‘multi-ethnic’ Babylonia in the seventh century, where the tribal (Aramaic and Chaldean) component of the population was of paramount importance, see, e.g., Frame 1992 and 2013.


Martina Schmidl 3 model. In fact it seems that a large part of the superstructure of the Neo-Babylonian empire consciously followed a Neo-Assyrian blueprint (e.g., Joannès 2000: 90; Jursa 2010b; most recently, Da Riva [in press]9). In contrast to Assyria, however, high palace officials were not at the same time heads of important provinces. Local and decentralised power outside the capital and the immediate presence of the king and his representatives lay in the hand of dignitaries of often tribal origin who did not have a court office. If the Neo-Babylonian empire had a structural weakness it was here. The kings – who in all likelihood were themselves of varying tribal background10 – made attempts to bind tribal dignitaries to themselves (e.g., through marriage alliances), but there was no systematic attempt to use the integrating power of the court to this end (Jursa 2014a: 131ff.).

Power was based on land and access to manpower, so it is unfortunate that it is difficult to assess the overall importance of landownership of the king and the royal family and that of notables with close ties to the crown (Jursa 2010a: 442). The lack of pertinent documentation raises the possibility of underrating this aspect of Babylonian land tenure. Nevertheless it seems plausible that while the palace household in Babylon was clearly an important consumer of goods, a majority of these goods were acquired through taxation. Royal land is attested directly or indirectly in nearly all agricultural regions for which we have documentation, but one would expect more references to estates of the king or high officials in lease and sale contracts and similar documentation from private archives if such estates had been a dominant factor in the hinterland of the ‘old’ towns of the alluvium. In any case, the a priori rule for pre-modern states undoubtedly holds true also for the Neo-Babylonian empire, viz. that the elite with which royal power had to compete or which it had to try to co-opt consisted largely of (large-scale) land owners (Crone 2003: 64ff.). The power of the magnates of tribal origin (rabbûtu: Beaulieu 2013: 36f.+17) seems to have rested in large tracts of grain land and thus in the benefits of extensive agriculture. This is well illustrated by a stone tablet dating to the sixth year of Nebuchadnezzar that was excavated at Abū Qubūr north of Sippar (Bruschweiler 1989): king Nebuchadnezzar exchanges a huge estate of 162 ha against 162 ha belonging to a certain Ḫaltiku, son of Ahhēšāya, almost certainly a Chaldean.11 The estates border on holdings of the simmagir, a magnate (likewise of tribal origin) and governor of a territory east of the Tigris, and on reclaimed land that had been distributed to families from Babylon. This information on large-scale holdings of tribal dignitaries is isolated, but this is owed to the urban ‘bias’ of the available data; the landholding pattern described by the stone tablet may not have been atypical.

Urban Babylonians, to the best of our knowledge, never held large estates that were comparable to that of the Chaldean Ḫaltiku. Nevertheless, the economic and hence also the political power of the Babylonian cities must have been considerable: it rested in the numbers of the population and the productivity of the labour-intensive and highly productive horticulture typically practiced by city-based landowners.12 The Babylonian cities had a tradition of semi-autonomous self-government which was to some extent based on the local temples headed by chief priests and temple administrators or ‘bishops’ (šangû, šatammu). In some larger cities these ‘clerics’ were joined by city governors or majors (šākin ṭēmi).13 These men, just as the chief priests, were normally recruited from a very restricted number of locally dominant families. Sometimes they acted jointly with local assemblies (puḫru) in which a certain degree of discretionary power could be vested.14 In the sixth century, under the Neo-Babylonian empire, all these institutions of local power had been harnessed by the central

9 For the Neo-Assyrian Court, see Fales 2001, Barjamovic 2011 and now also Groß 2014 for the most up-to-date study. 10 See now also Beaulieu 2013: 35ff. and 44f. 11 His name is to be normalized as /ḥaśīk/, which is West-Semitic, or specifically Aramaic, “the preserved one.” The patronymic is Akkadian. No Babylonian notable of an urban background would bear such a name. 12 On these matters see Jursa 2010a: 316ff. 13 The rule is that a šatammu is partnered with a šakin ṭēmi, whereas a šangû as “chief priest” of a minor city does not have such a counterpart. 14 We are unfortunately not well informed on the composition of these assemblies. It is unlikely that even in their heyday in the seventh century (provisionally, Barjamovic 2004) they were true citizen assemblies in which all free males of a city could participate; it is more likely they were formed by a kind of oligarchy of rich and powerful local patricians. It is possible that puḫru reunions were ad-hoc gatherings which had no real ‘institutional’ identity of their own and were instantly dissolved once the issue that had prompted their creation was resolved (Pirngruber (forthcoming)).


Times of Change (?) 4 royal government for its own purposes. Entire lineages of prominent clans originating in Babylon had been transferred to cities like Uruk, Ur or Sippar, where they represented the interests of the crown and of the capital city (Jursa 2010a: 136f.). Chief priests and city governors, for all their local background, were royal appointees and were supervised by ubiquitous royal commissioners (qīpu, bēl piqitti). The cities’ and the temples’ resources were thus at the disposal of the crown: we have to look to the period of Achaemenid rule over Babylonia to see the cities and their elites acting independently of the rulers – with dire consequences for them after the crushing of their rebellion against Xerxes in 484.15

While the cities of the central alluvium had thus been brought more or less into line by the royal administration, the same cannot be said for the important tribal areas in the south and south-east of the country. In all likelihood the main source of the empire’s military power was located in these tribes,16 and it is therefore unsurprising that the tribes, and their military leaders, were a source of instability. The frequent changes in the royal line, which possibly can be interpreted on one level as inter-tribal conflicts, bear witness of this structural instability (Jursa 2014a: 131ff.).

Little can be said on the structure of the provincial administration in the empire’s periphery. While it is possible that here and there stable provincial governments were established in the footsteps of the Assyrians, it is more likely that military rather than administrative control was the norm: Babylonian rule may have meant little more than regular appearances of the tribute-levying Babylonian army for wide parts of Syria and the Levant – a checkerboard of vassal kingdoms and more or less independent city-states – outside the few cities of strategic importance that had a permanent Babylonian garrison.17 Only from the last years of Nebuchadnezzar onwards do we find some textual references to a stable presence of Babylonians in the west and some attempts at the formation of actual Babylonian enclaves or ‘colonies’ in Syria and near the Mediterranean seaboard (Kleber and van der Brugge (in press); Jursa and Wagensonner 2014).

In conclusion then, the centralising power of the crown (and the capital) stood in structural competition with centrifugal or at least particularistic tendencies and interests in the Babylonian cities and in particular in the tribal areas in the Mesopotamian core of the empire. Conflict occurred along the lines of ethnic and socio-economic division. The crown pushed for centralisation and bureaucratic control, while the local powers, and in particular the tribes, tried to resist these attempts. The tribal leaders could not be integrated easily into the palace-based royal administration. Their positions of power in their territories were not, or not entirely, counterbalanced by the royal establishment: unlike in Assyria, high ranking palace dignitaries of (presumably) indubitable loyalty had apparently no provinces of their own to govern in the name of the king and were thus not independently powerful.

3. The fiscal base of the Neo-Babylonian monarchy and the ‘reach’ of the state

The preceding bird’s-eye view of the political structure of the Neo-Babylonian empire shows that the Neo-Babylonian kings, for all their ideologically founded assertions to the opposite, could not claim unopposed ‘despotic power’ in Michael Mann’s terminology. The tribal communities must have been the state’s major competitors, as argued above; as for the much better documented Babylonian cities, we have already referred to the crown’s generally successful attempts in co-opting at least parts of the urban elites (including especially the notables of the capital Babylon itself) – which does not mean that the relation of the crown to the Babylonian cities was devoid of potential for conflict. The origin of such conflicts or tensions must almost a priori be sought in the crown’s claim on the economic resources of the cities and the temples.18 The development of the Neo-Babylonian empire’s

15 For the revolts and their consequences see Waerzeggers 2003/2004 and Kessler 2004 as well as Jursa 2013 with references to additional discussions of the topic; for the institutions of urban self-government, see, e.g., Bongenaar 1997, Barjamovic 2004, Kleber 2008, Joannès 2000: 112ff., Jursa (in press). 16 What we hear about the Babylonian citizen and temple militias does not strike one as particularly impressive neither from the viewpoint of professionalism and nor regarding numbers (e.g., MacGinnis 2012a). 17 See, e.g., Da Riva 2010b; 2012: 15ff.; Kleber and van der Brugge (in press); Jursa and Wagensonner 2014: 109 for references to further discussions of the nature of Neo-Babylonian domination in the west. 18 This is best visible in the introduction of the rent farm system on temple lands, by which the crown not only tried to improve the efficiency of temple agriculture, but also aimed at getting a tighter control over this crucial part of the temples’ resources by bringing in contractors who depended on the crown’s patronage (most recently, Janković 2013).


Martina Schmidl 5 fiscal structures therefore reflects directly the monarchy’s relative ‘despotic power’ in the cities when it comes to the king’s control over the cities’ institutions and especially the large temple households, and it also mirrors the state’s ‘infrastructural power’ (Michael Mann, again) in that the way the state drew on private wealth reflects directly the state’s ability (or lack thereof) in general to reach into society.19

The institutional households of first millennium Babylonia have been investigated thoroughly, and there is no need to go into this matter in any detail here.20 One point which concerns the overall structure of the state should be noted, however: in comparison to the ‘private’ sector of the economy, the economic weight of the institutional sector as represented by the traditional oikos-mode of production and consumption within the great households was clearly limited. The temples in particular were by no means strong, self-sufficient oikoi in the traditional sense (Weber 1978: 381ff.). They did own large tracts of land, but this land was generally of medium or low quality and the temples lacked the manpower necessary to improve these estates on a grand scale. This limited their weight as centres of production and consumption. As stated above, the royal household on the other hand was a major consumer of resources, but not a major producer; certainly not a producer whose products came into circulation within the economy at large – with the quite probably important exception of textiles.21 In terms of the influential model of early state development which has been proposed by William Bonney and Richard Ormrod,22 Babylonia was therefore not a domain state23 that produced its resources mostly by state-owned means of production. Rather, the Neo-Babylonian empire is best described as a tax state which drew on the renewable resources of its core territory in a fairly systematic way. This obviously does not exclude the presence of some elements of the domain state in the core and a strong slant towards a tribute state24 which plundered and extorted in its periphery. The Neo-Babylonian empire shares this characteristic with its forerunner, the Neo-Assyrian empire, and with its Achaemenid successor.

None of the foregoing distinguishes the Neo-Babylonian empire particularly within what might be termed the continuum of pre-industrial societies as admirably synthesized by Crone (2003). The interests of the Neo-Babylonian state with respect to its subject population(s) in the imperial core were essentially limited to military and labour levies, taxation and maintaining internal stability in accordance with the demands of the prevalent ideological framework, all of which of course served the interests of the ruler and the elites (if not necessarily to the same degree and in the same way).25 The propria of this empire emerge clearer only when details of the system and quantifications are taken into consideration. The reach of the state and the quantity of resources the state could extract depended of course on the size of the territory, on the efficiency of resource extraction, and on the strength of the economic substructure. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, the Mesopotamian empires of the Iron Age were operating on an entirely different scale than their Bronze Age

19 Incidentally, we address here at least indirectly the concerns of a traditional Assyriological approach to the theme of the Leiden Rencontre, which would take the dichotomy between the public sphere and the private sphere to correspond in essence to the distinction between the sphere of the large institutional oikoi, the palace(s) and temples, on one hand, and the sphere of the ‘individual’ household without institutional attachments, on the other. This approach cannot be adopted as a principal focus of the investigation for our period, given the comparatively reduced socio-economic weight of the institutional households in first millennium BC Babylonia. 20 The following is largely based on Jursa 2010a. Note also, for the later Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, the syntheses Hackl 2013 and Monerie 2013. 21 On the royal household see Da Riva 2013 and Jursa 2010b; on royal landholding, Jursa 2010a: 442, and for textile production in the palace, see Kleber 2008: 246ff. For the Neo-Babylonian empire it cannot be claimed, pace Barjamovic 2013: 151 (whence the following quotes), that a centralization of “production, or at least the control of production” “was a characteristic feature of the Mesopotamian empires”. 22 Bonney and Ormrod 1999; see also Bonney 1995 and 1999. 23 By Bonney and Ormrod’s definition a state which draws more than half of its income from domain land. 24 The tribute state for Bonney and Ormrod is a state that relies on plunder and extortion of surplus production. 25 See also the definition of the ‘essential minimum’ of state activities proposed by Tilly (summarized by Scheidel 2013: 20f.). We find them all, albeit to a different degree: “statemaking” (checking the state’s internal competitors); “warmaking” (against outside competitors), “protection” (especially of “the ruler’s principal allies”), and “extraction” (of the means necessary to achieve these goals).


Times of Change (?) 6 precursors. It is self-evident that these empires were “specialists in … extensive power” for the purpose of integrating – with inadequate resources – large areas and large numbers of people for minimal cooperation (Crone 2003: 57). But one might at least pose the question whether the corresponding image of the Mesopotamian imperial state of the Iron Age as “‘capstone’ on top of society, keeping its various components in place, but incapable of stimulating further development” (Crone 2003: 57) is entirely adequate. Instances for the conscious and planned creation of institutions and infrastructure on the part of the state that acted upon society and affected it intensively and in depth can be cited. In case of the Neo-Babylonian empire, we see in the crucial area of agriculture a huge effort made by the state to improve the hydrological infrastructure that results in a transformation, at least in some regions of Babylonia of the basic parameters of agrarian production. Qualitatively and quantitatively, southern Mesopotamia had not experienced anything of the kind before, and the impact of this interference of the state with the workings of society and economy were far reaching.26 Creating economic growth in this way, the state obviously also enlarged the fiscal base on which it could draw, and this may have been a major incentive for its activities. The resulting ‘affluence’ of the state and its – for the period – considerable mobilizing power is reflected by the extraordinary building projects of the time which transformed the urban landscape of Babylonia and whose echo in Graeco-Roman and Biblical sources is with us to this day. Even so, and even taking into account the implications of state action aiming at legal reform and the installation of unified administrative procedures,27 the reach of the state was indeed restricted, and its effects seem to have been ever more diluted as one descended the social scale.

Taxation and service obligations had to target preferably households – institutional or private – with surplus resources.28 The agricultural income of temples was subjected to a state tax from around 600 BC. Around 530 BC the tax amounted to a moderate 3.33 percent of the temples’ harvest, for earlier and later periods a quantification is impossible. Over and above the regular taxation of the temples’ agricultural income, the royal administration drew on temple resources by requesting manpower for royal building projects and victuals for the provisioning of royal palaces. These royal demands were met by the temples in part with their own funds and by drawing on the reservoir of dependent labour at their disposal, in part the obligation was passed on to free members of the temple community, such as priests (and generally to the heads of private urban households?) in the form of service obligations or obligations to pay for substitute labour. Royal pressure was always high and could be enforced in an erratic and/or despotic manner by officials,29 but quantification is out of reach.

A second important source of state income (including manpower) was constituted by the holders of royal land grants. The estates in question were often situated on recently reclaimed or even marginal land; sometimes they seem to have consisted of such temple land as could not be farmed by the temples themselves. In this way, the land-for-service system served both to integrate foreign groups into the society and the fabric of the state and to extend the range of state-controlled agriculture into otherwise under-exploited areas. As always in Mesopotamian history (van Driel 2002), there was a tendency to dissociate the actual service and the exploitation of the land connected with the service. Inheritance procedures, heavy service obligations (e.g., military service away from home) and the fact that some soldier-tenants held more than one grant all caused outsiders to be brought in to do the actual agricultural work (van Driel 1999: 219f.). There was also always a role for entrepreneurs

26 This is visible both in the archaeological record (Adams 1982) and in the textual documentation (as argued in Jursa 2010a; see also Janković 2013). From the view-point of the longue durée, note that Adams shows how the development that began in the Iron Age eventually led to the reclamation of practically all of Northern Babylonia for agrarian use through large-scale inter-regional irrigation networks in the Late Sasanian and Early Islamic period. 27 For the fairly well-established protocols of Late Babylonian judicial procedures see Holtz 2009 and 2014 (even though some of his evidence dates to the early Achaemenid period: the Persian conquest in 539 BC did not cause a systematic departure from previous procedures in the realm of jurisdiction); furthermore, Wunsch 2000, 2003a and 2003b and Jursa in Hackl et al. 2014: 90f. (for the standardized letters of judges); for administrative reform see, e.g., Wells 2014, and see below. 28 For the following, see the documentation in Jursa 2011a, where detailed references can be found. We will occasionally draw also on Persian-period sources (up to the reign of Xerxes) because the Persian conquest in 539 BC did not create a fundamental break in the taxation system. 29 E.g., TMH 2/3, 254; Jursa in Hackl et al. 2014: 87 on no. 149.


Martina Schmidl 7 (traders, mostly) with access to money in this system: they could extend credit (for tax purposes) to the holders of the grants and eventually achieve control over their land. The land grants of indebted soldiers could be pledged to businessmen to be exploited by their agents or to be sublet by them, frequently to the original holders of the land. Furthermore, collectives of soldiers with a common tax load would have an interest in cultivating (or having cultivated) as much land as possible. Therefore there was an incentive to make use of outsiders whenever the numbers of grant-holders were insufficient for the land available.

For the urban population of Babylonia, the modes of taxation remained structurally unchanged throughout the late sixth and early fifth century, from the late reign of Nebuchadnezzar to the end of the reign of Darius I. The taxation of city dwellers was based on the possession of certain types of agricultural land or urban real estate or on the affiliation to a certain social or professional group. The most frequently attested basis for service and tax obligations was landownership. Tax payers – heads of households – were grouped together in tax and service units most often called ešertu, “decury,” in which (ten) men sharing a similar social and economic background were united. Members of these ešertus had the (theoretical) choice between serving in person, according to rota system, or hiring men to do service for them. This approach spread the weight of the tax and service demands over several households and allowed an inclusion also of less-affluent strata of society into the system. Overall, however, the system targeted urban households that were comparatively well-off and disposed at least of some surpluses in kind, money or manpower that could be claimed by the state. We cannot prove that the free population in general was subjected directly to such demands, especially poor families that did not own rural or urban land. There was no general head-tax or the like or a generalized service obligation, as far as we can tell. Poorer members of society could probably be called upon by their communities in some circumstances: villages for instance demonstrably could be forced to contribute as collectives to state-controlled building activities,30 and the same was probably true also for larger cities, but in general the workforce of non-propertied and institutionally unattached Babylonians was harnessed by the state only indirectly: it was they who were hired by well-to-do city dwellers to do service in their stead.

Indirect taxation and fees collected by the government, or by tax farmers on behalf of the government, include sales taxes (first on real estate sales, from Darius (at least) onwards, also on slave sales); taxes on the transport of goods (harbour, bridge and gate tolls), which could be substantial;31 and perhaps (in some occasions at least) payments for water-rights in the context of agriculture (Jursa 2011a: 174).

The direct and indirect taxes on commodities, including agricultural produce, that we have seen notwithstanding, manpower was the main resource the state extracted from society. It is indicative of the narrow surplus margins with which the state had to operate, and of the resulting low military participation rate (cf. Crone 2003: 41) also in the relatively prosperous Babylonia of the sixth century, that in normal circumstances it took tax units of ten moderately well-to-do urban households of priests and small-scale landowners to pay for one soldier or corvée worker the year round. Rural communities outside the system of military land-grants were able to furnish even less manpower on a regular basis: the likelihood of an individual of rural background to be called up for service (other than for very short periods, perhaps) was low. The peculiarities of the system become evident when it is compared to the organization of corvée labour in Roman Egypt. There, every man of “Egyptian” status had to work five days (a penthemeros) of every year on the irrigation canals and dams; an obligation that was carefully monitored by the authorities down to the village level and that correspondingly has left a substantial ‘papyrus trail.’32 If one assumes that those relatively affluent Babylonian urban households which were integrated into the ešertu tax units included on average three males (which may be too high), the service obligation in Babylon amounts to a theoretical twelve days33 for every male member

30 E.g., BE 8, 80, Jursa 2010a: 57253. 31 Transporting grain by boat from southern to central Babylonia (ten days of travel up-stream) could cost about twelve percent of the value of the cargo. Of these twelve percent, nine were spent for transport costs (boat rental costs and labour); three percent were spent for bridge and harbour taxes (Weszeli in Jursa 2010: 140ff.). 32 E.g., Kruse 2002: 306 with further references. I am grateful to my colleagues B. Palme and S. Tost for pertinent information. 33 Or more, if households were smaller, which is possible.


Times of Change (?) 8 of the taxed stratum of society. This is much more than the penthemeros of Roman Egypt, but the segment of the Babylonian population that was targeted by these service obligations was much smaller (and correspondingly, more affluent and thus better able to produce the necessary surplus) than the sector of the Egyptian population liable for the five-day corvée service. In the Babylonian case, extending the network of direct resource-extraction for the state further down the social scale would not have been cost-effective, or, more likely, the limitations of the bureaucratic apparatus or the society-wide surplus margin (or both) would not have allowed such an extension: the capillary reach of the state – albeit mediated by local authorities – down to the level of individual households which the Roman empire enjoyed in Egypt cannot be compared to the clearly lesser ‘infrastructural’ power the Neo-Babylonian state could harness to draw on the resources of its subject population.

4. The agents of state domination The issue here is the identity, in general terms, of the actors at the social, legal and economic interface between the state and its subjects. Two main types of agents of domination can be distinguished: those exercising domination by appointment through a higher authority, and in that authority’s name, and those who exercise domination on a contractual basis, usually in a very clearly circumscribed field.

Contracting out to individuals some aspects of institutional business is a frequently encountered phenomenon in administrative systems of limited efficiency and limited reach: it facilitated the task of centralized bureaucracies and allowed the state to reckon with guaranteed returns even if these were lower than the theoretically possible maximum.34 In our period we find management by contract in the sphere of the administration of domain land and property (institutional agriculture and livestock management) as well as the transfer by contract of governmental prerogatives to individuals: the farming of taxes and rights.35 Some individuals undertook such obligations as entrepreneurs, even after having placed a competitive bid against competitors, with a view towards making a profit. But as in the Achaemenid and Hellenistic empires, we also find quasi-liturgies which were a compulsory burden rather than a potentially profitable occupation.36 Among the contractors, different social types can be distinguished. They range from the royal client whose involvement in institutional business was as much a matter of politics as of economics (e.g., the Urukean rent farmer Šumu-ukīn, Janković 2013: 158ff.) over the small businessman who was wholly engaged in commerce (e.g., Bēl-eṭēri-Šamaš of Nippur and Itti-Šamaš-balāṭu of Larsa, Jursa 2010a: 194ff.) to the institutional dependent who was saddled with a managerial obligation he would much rather have avoided (Gimillu of Uruk, Janković 2013: 235ff.).

Since Late Babylonian rent and tax-farming is generally well understood we focus on officials in the narrow sense of the word, men who exercised domination on the basis of an appointment by a higher authority and understood themselves to be part of an administrative system. They can be divided into three basic types that are ubiquitous also in all or most other pre-modern empires: (A) household officials or familiares, (B) notables or aristocrats, and (C) part-time clerks.37 It is probable that following the Assyrian model an oath of office (adû) was foreseen in the Neo-Babylonian empire for all these types of officials. This oath formally established the special relationship between the crown and its officials.

“I said to Bēl-erība, the courtier (ša rēši) whom my lord the king [has appointed] to oversee

work in Larsa, [as follows] - PNN, the priests, are witnesses against him here - : ‘you are [bou]nd by the oath to my lord the king. The tablet of the oath to my lord the king […’ (break)]” (... [umma bē]l adê ša šarri bēlia attā ṭuppi/kunuk adê ša šarri bēlia […]; GCCI 2, 395)

34 The motivation of the institutions or the state to contract out parts of their activities are well described in Weber 1978: 965f. 35 This is a very well researched topic. See, e.g., van Driel 1999; Jursa 2010a: 193ff.; MacGinnis 2012b; Janković 2013. 36 Jursa 2010a: 291f. with note 1751f. 37 See in very general terms the discussions in Crone 2003: 64ff. (“elite-building”) and Weber 1978: 1025ff. (“patrimonial offices”).


Martina Schmidl 9 “... you should know that Iṣṣūru … said a bad thing about the king … aren’t you servants of the

king (ardānu ša šarri)? Iṣṣūru said a bad thing about the king – you cannot let him get away with it! ... I herewith adjure you by (your) oath to the king …” (ina adê ša šarri uttammīkunūši; BBVOT 3, 5438)

“if you fear the king and the oath (you swore) to him call up the ploughmen and …” (kī šarru u

adêšu palḫāta …; YOS 21, 129, letter of a royal official to a temple official) By swearing the oath of office, officials entered into a world governed by particular rules and

behavioural codes, and infringements against these rules and codes were correspondingly designated as ḫīṭu “fault” or “sin,” i.e., by a term that carried strong religious connotations.39 However, while the oath of office was conceptualized to create a homologous relationship between the king as fount of all authority and all those who held an office in his realm, it is clear that the officials’ social and economic background had a decisive influence on how office holders conceptualized their duties.

We begin with (A) the household official, the ruler’s familiaris.40 These officials are part of the ruler’s personal establishment; they are dependent on him and have their primary function within the ruler’s household, but in a second step they can also be employed outside the household of the lord. They are crucial for the development of the type of domination Weber labelled “patrimonial bureaucracy” (note 4 above). In Babylonia (and generally in the Ancient Near East), this type is represented in its clearest form by the courtier, the ša rēši, who, as an ideal type, was deprived of family ties and inserted into the royal household.41 But other royal officials working outside their city of origin, such as the qīpus, the royal commissioners or ‘residents’ appointed as co-overseers of the temples belong here too.42 A Late Babylonian commentary from the Hellenistic period (De Zorzi 2014: 699f.) on a passage in the divinatory series Šumma izbu gives us the Babylonian view on the nature of the courtier’s position: “‘Courtier’ (lit.: ‘son of the palace’43) (means) ša rēši (‘courtier’) because as a child [he was

summo]ned [to the palace] (and) will not return to (his) father.” (…mār ekalli : ša rēši ina libbi ša ṣeḫruma / [ana ekalli šas]û ana abi lā iturru :; De Zorzi and Jursa 2011)

The commentary emphasizes the courtiers’ separation from their family origins. Deracination of

this kind was supposed to allow the formation of unconditional loyalty towards the ruler. Courtiers were not supposed to build up a patrimony and a lineage of their own, even though in practice this happened anyway.44 The ethos of these officials required obedience and loyalty on the basis of the household setting. Nevertheless, as can be seen from the following quotation from a letter of the Neo-Assyrian period, persuasion, negotiation and co-optation nevertheless had their place: Esarhaddon goes to great rhetorical lengths to convince the courtier (manzāz pāni in this case45) he established as šandabakku (city governor) of Nippur to do his duty.

38 GCCI 2, 395 and BBVOT 3, 54 are letters of denunciation from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. For a slightly different understanding of GCCI 2, 395 (following Ebeling) see Sandowicz 2012: 82. Collation shows that there is certainly no ˹lú˺ before the first ˹a˺-de-e of the passage, but perhaps traces of ˹en˺. 39 For the Neo-Babylonian oath of office (adû) see, e.g., Joannès 2002: 90, Sandowicz 2012: 64ff. and 81f.; Jursa (in press b). For ḫīṭu in bureaucratic contexts see Wells (in press). 40 Weber 1978: 1026. 41 For the latest on the ša rēši in the Assyrian empire (whence we have the best information) see the synthesis in Groß 2014: 245ff.; cf. also, e.g., Barjamovic 2011: 57ff. For the Late Babylonian ša rēši see, e.g., Jursa 2011b. 42 E.g., Bongenaar 1997: 34ff. 43 According to Groß 2014: 265ff., the Neo-Assyrian mār ekalli were a distinct group of courtiers set apart by their non-Assyrian origin; they may have been brought into the palace establishment at a young age to be re-educated there, essentially as the commentary cited here suggests. 44 Groß 2014: 248ff.; Jursa (in press) for data on family connections of Babylonian ša rēšis. A pertinent case-study on the seventh-century Assyrian general and ša rēši Bēl-ibni by Groß and Pirngruber is forthcoming. 45 Groß 2014: 264.


Times of Change (?) 10 “The earlier šandabakkus, one of whom you will resemble only if you make an effort, whether

they were content (ša libbašunu … pašru) with their lords or not, they remained nevertheless courtiers (manzāz pāni) of their lords, like you – did they (ever) miss an opportunity to do what is good for their lords as you have? … now improve my opinion of you (šumkunu ina pānia bunnâ)” (SAA 18, 3)

In another letter, a certain Šumāya writes to the crown prince Assurbanipal:

“The crown prince, my lord, shall enquire: ‘Was my grandfather not assisted by the ša rēši Aššur-bēlu-kaˀˀin?’, and afterwards, when your grandfather ascended to the throne, did he not appoint him as scribe? Please, let the crown prince not forsake me! Let (the memory of) the name of his (the crown prince’s) grandfather and the service of my father not disappear from your house!” (SAA 16, 34)

Against the interpretation offered in SAA 16 and following a suggestion of R. Pirngruber,46 the ša

rēši Aššur-bēlu-kaˀˀin must have been the father (potentially the adoptive father) of Šumāya. The sender claims his family relationship with a former courtier as grounds to be granted the crown-prince’s patronage.47 The relationship here is personal and family-based, resulting – thus at least goes the argument of the sender – in mutually binding obligations to offer, respectively, service, and trust and support.

There are no comparable sources from sixth century Babylonia, but one must assume that also in the Neo-Babylonian empire similar bonds of mutual obligation existed between the king and his courtiers, household officials and clients: nothing else can be expected given the patrimonial background of Neo-Babylonian royal authority. Nevertheless, we also see an increasing professionalization of this class of officials. Under Achaemenid rule, the presence of specialized foreigners, especially Egyptians,48 among the ranks of the courtiers is a clear indication of this process. Even before, however, the sources contain references to rule-bound and stable procedures of administration which can be considered signs of a gradual process of genuine ‘bureaucratization’ in a Weberian sense of the word.49 In this context, the expression amāt šarri, literally “word of the king,” serves as a blanket term for several distinct types of interaction within the royal administration: it can refer to specific royal commands, and to the right to be granted an audience with the king in an emergency, but, importantly, it can also refer to general rules of procedure50 or be invoked in a general admonition to follow approved procedure and to justify oneself vis-à-vis the royal administration.51 In essence, amāt šarri in such contexts designates a body of regulations that could also be designated as “administrative law.” It is thus unsurprising that in the later Achaemenid period amāt šarri in this usage is substituted by dātu (ša šarri) “law, legal ruling” (Kleber 2010). Violation of such rules (or protocols, or administrative laws) constitutes ḫīṭu, literally “a sin” (viz., against the oath of office) and entails legal consequences. The resulting ethos of service is well expressed by the ostentatious and perhaps exaggerated uprightness of a ša rēši who imagines his colleagues might suggest his bending the rules to extract himself out of a difficult administrative situation created by the lack of accountants:

46 Oral communication. I am grateful to R. Pirngruber for pointing out this letter to me. 47 Note that the letter goes on to say: “the king, your father, loves the son of one who worked for him.” 48 On the Egyptians in Achaemenid service see Hackl and Jursa (in press). 49 Wells (in press); Jursa (in press b). 50 E.g., “the king commands (amāt šarri šī): whoever takes his case against someone to us (viz., judges) [should also] talk to the chief priest of the city (in question) …” (CT 22, 231); “the king commands: stamped silver is not to be accepted” (CT 22, 40); “the king commands: no one (viz., no official) is to accept any gifts” (BIN 1, 73). 51 “…PN is answerable to the royal administration (lit.: the word of the king is upon PN)” (amāt šarri ina muḫḫi PN; YOS 21, 89).


Martina Schmidl 11 “If you say: ‘Nabû-aḫu-iddin [i.e., the writer] should simply violate the protocol (ḫīṭu ina libbi

liḫṭi)’, (you should know): as much as you used to bend the rules, I will never do so!” (adī muḫḫi ša attūnu ḫīṭu taḫtaṭṭâ anāku ḫīṭu ul aḫaṭṭi; YOS 3, 17 // TCL 9, 129)

Familiares or household officials are the backbone of patrimonial domination and exist wherever

one encounters such structures. They are essential also for counterbalancing the weight of officials drawn from the rank of the notables or dignitaries. ‘Double structures’ of administration in which A-type officials accompany, supervise or even duplicate the activities of officials who are members of the social elite in their own right are therefore common in such states, and Babylonia is no exception: temple administrations offer us the clearest examples. The reliance on full-time household officials implied an in-built tendency towards professionalization and bureaucratization. This sometimes generated innovations of administrative practice and reforms of procedure that could be perceived as departures from tradition. In Weberian terms, such phenomena move traditional patrimonial government some way towards what Weber calls sultanism – a form of patrimonial rule that as an ideal type is not bound by tradition but can be quite bureaucratic. Some of the administrative changes made by Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus are examples of such bureaucratic rationality52 – and it is clear that they were sometimes strongly resented by the traditional elites to which I now turn.

Type B officials, whom we might call ‘notables’ or ‘aristocrats’ or simply members of an elite, have access to office owing to traditional class privileges, local connections and wealth, in particular landed wealth: this type is the patrimonial official par excellence. In pre-modern states, most of the internal political conflicts were played out along the fault-line between such elites (in particular, landowners) and the state/king.53 Weber’s concept of estate-type domination (“ständische Herrschaft”) is of interest here: this is a particular form of patrimonial government that is characterized by the fact that “the administrative staff appropriates particular powers and the corresponding economic assets,” typically “the positions” themselves, “the material means of administration” and “the governing powers”; for this reason they constitute an ‘estate’ or status group (Weber 1978: 232f.). Office-holding can be either a traditional privilege of such an estate and as such a potential factor of instability in that it counteracts the effects of centralizing state power, or it can be an actual means of furthering centralization by co-opting elites and creating a nexus between their interests and those of the crown. In sixth century Babylonia, the most powerful representatives of this group, whom we might call magnates,54 were undoubtedly the principal commanders of the military and the chiefs of the major tribal groupings (most likely, these two groups were largely co-extensive55). We are, however, better informed about Babylonian notables who held office in the context of urban institutions. In the sixth century these include important representatives of the religious establishment, in particular the chief priests (šangû) and ‘bishops’ (šatammu), as well as local governors (šākin ṭēmi). These men were all members of a restricted number of prestigious urban clans. Lineage (descent in the male line) and the tradition of the ‘house of the father,’ the bīt abi, were decisive for determining their social position, in particular in the case of the priestly families with their practice of group-specific endogamy.56

‘Estate-type’ domination is in potential conflict with other forms of domination, especially with a centralistic monarchy that is supported by a partly bureaucratic substructure and the service of dependent administrators (note 53 above): keeping the powerful office-holding magnates ‘in the fold’ must needs. have been one principal objective – if not the most important objective of all – of royal policy in the core of the empire. The chief value official sources project onto the image of the ‘ideal’ office-holding member of the elite of type B is quasi-filial piety: the typical sentiment attributed to officials in a patrimonial setting. We find this transposed into a negative key in the following passage extracted from a legal document referring to the execution of an official for unspecified misdeeds committed qua officio:

52 The gradual agricultural reform that centered on the step-by-step introduction of the rent-farm system is the best-known example. 53 See, e.g., Crone 2003: 63f. 54 rabbûtu, see Beaulieu 2013: 36+17. 55 Beaulieu 2013: 36f.; Jursa 2014a: 131ff. 56 E.g., Nielsen 2010; Jursa 2010a: 56f.; Waerzeggers 2011a.


Times of Change (?) 12 “PN … gave orders that were sinful (annu) and wicked (gillatu), he planned evil deeds. and did

not respect (naṣāru) the oath (adû) to his lord the king, but persisted in criminal acts (surrātu) – but Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, the circumspect prince (etc.) ... clearly perceived the evil deeds. (lemnētu) of PN and discovered his plot (rikistu). He convicted him publicly of the wickedness (gullultu) he had committed and ...” (AfO 17, 1 & NABU 2001/102; reign of Nebuchadnezzar)

The text does not make clear the nature of the precise nature of the crime committed by the

executed man. However, the religiously and morally charged terminology is no coincidence: the lack of piety vis-à-vis his lord the king turned the official’s crime in any case into an intensely personal attack against the royal persona, an attack that could not but lead to the guilty man’s death.

An unpublished and fragmentary temple ritual preserved in a second-century copy from Babylon can serve as a counterpoint to the image of the pious and obedient (or wicked and disobedient) servant of the crown. In this text, a strong claim for the quasi-supremacy of the authority of Esangila’s chief priest, the aḫu rabû, over secular authorities, including the king, is made. The text is probably a late (post sixth-century) composition and may reflect in fact the loss of priestly authority in a period of foreign domination rather than the opposite. Nevertheless, it addresses tensions that demonstrably existed already in the sixth century. The entire preserved part of the tablet contains a speech of Marduk addressing the aḫu rabû of Esangila:

“… The king shall greet you reverently … your name shall be as great as that of the king … Let neither king nor governor strike your cheek. … Let a hostile king destroy the king or governor who do strike your cheek” (šarru ana kâšu lilbin appu … lū rabi šunku kīma šarri … šarru u šakkanakku lā imaḫḫaṣ lētka … šarru u šakkanakku ša imaḫḫaṣu lētka šarru nakiršunu mamma liškun dabdêšunu; BM 3265557).

“Your name shall be as great as that of the king” – this extraordinarily hyperbolic claim reveals the

rhetoric or persuasive nature of the text. It is an expression of the aspirations of the religious elite in Babylon to royal recognition of its importance, or rather pre-eminence, on the strength of its religious authority. This is not a view any Neo-Babylonian king (let alone the Seleucid rulers to whom this text was probably addressed) is likely to have shared. In the present context the text is important for the explicit expression of the Marduk priests’ vision for the distribution of authority in Babylonia. It mirrors a conflict that is similar – on the level of generalization suggested here – to the ‘treason text’ cited above in that it explicitly pits elite representatives of an ‘estate’ of office holders, priests in the case of the ritual, a city-based notable with much landed wealth in the case of the treason text, against the power of the crown.

Such conflicts affected the state as a whole. To manage the aspirations of the elites, the crown could resort to coercion, or attempt co-optation. In the case of Babylonia, we find examples of both. As we have seen, tribal and military leaders in Babylonia continued to exert a decisive influence on the state as a whole just as they had done in the seventh century – up to the point of claiming the throne. The contentious figure of Nabonidus for whom there is a rich documentation of contemporary and later sources which show him in a very different light reflects power struggles between the crown and Babylonian urban elites and perhaps also a part of the military/tribal establishment;58 it would seem that while the king could generally impose his will with success, his control was somewhat brittle, and the battle over his image after his fall was obviously won by his detractors. Owing to the nature of the available sources and especially the absence of royal letter archives comparable to those from Neo-Assyrian Nineveh, there is little information on the details of what must have been a continuous process of negotiation and re-calibration of the relationship between the crown and the various urban and tribal elites. We have seen the moral or religious bond that the crown strove to create between the elites and the king by imposing the oath of allegiance, adû. Warfare and the opportunities it offered created a priori an important conjuncture of interests between the king and his

57 A publication by the present writer is forthcoming. We have quoted here only a few extracts of the preserved 19 lines of text. 58 E.g., Beaulieu 1989 and 2007; Waerzeggers 2007.


Martina Schmidl 13 military elites. Following the paradigm established by the work of Elias, Paravicini and others, we might also be inclined to point to the role of the court and court ceremonial for the ‘disciplination’ of office-holding elites.59 Frequent visits to the court were the rule both for officials and royal clients, as were royal inspections of cities and temples outside of Babylon (e.g., Jursa 2014b: 110f.). However, as we have seen, the most powerful territorial dignitaries did not, or not necessarily, hold a court office, whereas high court officials did not necessarily hold governorships. Other means of control were necessary. The crown claimed the right of promotion for all holders of high rank in an urban context at least, even though family connections and local roots were decisive to qualify for office in the first place. Superior royal power over the urban elites can be seen in the case of royal promotion and demotion of high priests and city governors, for instance; it is also apparent in the ubiquitous installation of double structures of administration in which the elite dignitaries were supervised by household officials of the crown. As stated above, such arrangements are in fact typical of patrimonial-bureaucratic empires and can also be found in the early Islamic empire and under the Mughals.60 From a comparative view-point, Rome is a major and rather instructive exception. The Roman empire had no need of such a costly (and inevitably inefficient) system of double responsibilities because it simply co-opted provincial elites very effectively by an offer of full integration and assimilation, i.e., by the offer to become Roman.61 No Ancient Near Eastern empire, and few later ones, for that matter, went that far, but the attempts to draw elites into the sphere of the crown and the state in some way can still be seen clearly. From the Neo-Babylonian empire we have for instance the case of the marriage of a daughter of Neriglissar with the bishop of Ezida; this was an attempt to establish a good relationship between the new king of Aramean descent and the Babylonian priests of Borsippa (Waerzeggers 2010: 72). In a similar vein, the account of Berossos according to which Neriglissar, an Aramean of the Puqūdu tribe, was the son-in-law of Nebuchadnezzar, possibly a member of the Chaldean Dakkūru tribe, is entirely credible: the union would constitute an attempt by the royal house to bind the Puqūdu to the royal cause (Jursa 2014a: 132). In an urban context, promotion by the king and royal sponsorship of temples was an obvious way of buying elite loyalty among the priestly families and the Babylonian ‘nobility.’ The rise, continued in the Achaemenid period, of Babylonian families like the Ilia, Ṣāḫit-ginê and Ša-nāšišu who made their way to high and highest offices with royal support in Borsippa, Sippar and Babylon is indicative of processes that must have been very common.62 Occasionally later, Achaemenid sources throw some indirect light on the interests and mechanisms that were at work also under the Neo-Babylonian empire. Thus we have for instance a clear case of an appropriation of royal prerogatives by ‘notables’ when late in the reign of Darius I the position of “royal resident” in several temples was held, not by ‘household officials’ (type A officials) as was normally the case, but by descendents of priestly families (type B officials).63 This must reflect the fact that the presence of the royally backed outsider within the temple institutions was resented by the ‘insiders’ who took advantage of a temporary weakness of central control to appropriate the office in question. That tensions of this kind were not a new development under Achaemenid rule is shown by some letters sent by a royal resident (qīpu) working in the Eanna temple in Uruk under Nebuchadnezzar. The letters reflect the obvious resentment felt by the royal dependant, who probably came from Babylon, when confronted with what he perceived as a lack of collaboration on the part of his Urukean colleagues – men who invariably were descendents of important priestly clans with the local roots the qīpu (painfully?) lacked.64 Finally, of course, the Achaemenid period shows us also the clearest case of a failure of elite co-optation: the revolts against Xerxes were largely

59 E.g., Hirschbiegel 2010. 60 Sijpesteijn 2013: 155 for Muslim Egypt (I owe this reference to L. Reinfandt); Blake 1979 and 2011 for the Mughals. 61 The pertinent bibliography is enormous (I am grateful to S. Tost for his advice in this matter). See in general Lendon 1997 as well as Ando 2000: 55ff. and 199ff.; Sherwin-White 1974: 221ff., and Millar 1977: 479ff. 62 E.g., Waerzeggers 2010: 65 and 69; Waerzeggers 2013; Waerzeggers in press; Jursa in press b. 63 Jursa (in press a). 64 See preliminarily Kleber 2008: 120f.; the whole dossier will be studied by Y. Levavi in his Vienna dissertation on administrative letters from the formative period of the Neo-Babylonian empire.


Times of Change (?) 14 supported by the urban elites of the Northern Babylonian cities, who therefore also suffered severely through the Persian reprisals after the crushing of the rebellion (note 15 above).

The least well-circumscribed type of office holder or agent of state domination to be discussed here

(type C officials) is the (part-time) clerk: low- or middle-ranking administrators such as (Cuneiform) scribes,65 gate keepers, accountants and measurers (mandidu), harvest estimators, etc, perhaps also royal judges belong here. They were men with a local, somewhat privileged background, who were normally literate.66 Access to office depended on patronage, but a professional qualification was required. In the temple contexts, clerks were often recruited from the ranks of the priestly families (without necessarily being priests themselves). In the royal administration, they needed to swear an oath of office as did all other officials; distinguishing type C clerks from the non-local specialist royal familiares is not always possible. Royal service (maṣṣartu) was upon appointment, it brought a stable remuneration (designated as isqu “allotment” or kurummatu “salary in kind”), and positions were guaranteed by higher authorities. All this is well illustrated by the following quote from an unpublished letter (the chief treasurer, rab kāṣiri, writes to high officials of the Eanna temple): “... Nabû-tabni-uṣur is doing royal service here (in Uruk), but the bishop has unlawfully taken

away his remuneration. So give him back his remuneration. … Get whatever they took away from him unlawfully and give it him” (nabû-tabni-uṣur maṣṣartu ša šarri akanna inaṣṣar šatammu isiqšu ana pirki ittaši u isiqšu terrima innaššu … mimmûšu mala ana pirki našû išânimma innaššu; PTS 2013)

Other, illicit or at least informal forms of remuneration existed too, even though they were sometimes frowned upon or even explicitly forbidden. The role of gifts (or bribes?) and of income resulting from the exercise of office (Sportelen) vis-à-vis the officials’ regular remuneration or salary is still in need of a more detailed investigation, since it is an important indication of the degree of ‘rationalization’ and bureaucratization that characterized the administrative system of the period. Here, two suggestive citations will suffice: (from a private letter) “... regarding the house in Babylon I spoke to the sukkallu. I promised

him a valuable gift (or bribe?) (šugarrû rabû aqtabâššu) and he decidedly (lū māda) looked after my interests.” (Amherst 262 = Hackl et al. 2014: No. 142)

(from a letter of an official) “... thereupon Kudurru objected (by saying): ‘the king commands:

no one (viz., no official) is to accept any gifts (qīštu)’ ...” (BIN 1, 73) 5. Conclusion

Approaching the Neo-Babylonian state with Weberian concepts and ideal types of domination in mind, it is possible to transcend the conventional dichotomy between the “public” and the “private” sphere. The former was evidently permeated on several levels by concerns determined by the latter, as is expected in a pre-modern patrimonial society, but a generalizing and typological approach allows a more nuanced view of the pertinent phenomena. The Neo-Babylonian empire can be shown to have been a composite entity at its centre in which the claims to power of the crown had to be negotiated with, or defended against, other powerful actors: the Babylonian urban communities and the Chaldean and Aramaen tribes. Much of the cultural and literary output of the period served the cause of the king in this sense. In general, the Babylonian urban elites and their institutions could be successfully co-opted or forced to serve the interests of the state (but some evidence for tensions can be found). Territorial magnates who were tribal (and military) leaders, on the other hand, could not always be integrated into the royal court and continued to be a cause of unrest and even rebellion (Neriglissar is only the clearest case). The ‘despotic power’ of the state was thus anything but uncontested. Its

65 Note that in contrast the Aramaic scribes (sēpiru) attested in the temple archives tend to be royal emissaries or in any case representatives of the crown and thus agents of centralization; they do not normally come from a local Babylonian background (Jursa 2012). They are probably better subsumed under the type A officials. 66 The best-known group are temple scribes (e.g., Bongenaar 1997: 56ff. and 481ff.).


Martina Schmidl 15 ‘infrastructural power,’ i.e., its ability to reach in capillary form into society, was likewise limited. The state put into place a system of limited direct taxation of agrarian production and more general indirect taxation of transactions and the movement of goods, and it levied manpower for infrastructural and defensive corvée and for the military. In doing so, it targeted not society at large; but rather those private and institutional households (especially in the urban context) that could produce a significant taxable surplus or could dispose of free manpower. There was no levee en masse, and even the penthemeros 5-day obligatory corvée service extracted from the rural population in general in Roman Egypt would seem to have been out of reach for the Babylonian bureaucracy. But it would be misleading to dwell only on the limitations of the state apparatus: state agency did contribute decisively to the economic development of the long sixth century that brought relatively high levels of general prosperity to the country.

Overall the administrative system of the Neo-Babylonian empire in its core67 can be described as a mixture of top- and bottom-level patrimonial structures and a middle stratum of professional, full-time administrators in royal service. The latters’ presence created a tendency towards the development of a more clearly bureaucratic system. The access of officials to the means of administration and government was restricted and regulated; transgressions were sanctioned. There were rule-bound procedures, one might even speak of a body of administrative laws. Following the Assyrian example, the crown attempted to create a distinct ethos of service by casting official duties in a moral or religious mould through the oath of office: all officials were supposed to display the specific ‘piety’ naturally expected from a household official. Guarantees for officials against the consequences of an abuse of power and bad administrative practice on the part of colleagues existed, as shown by the ḫīṭu ša šarri dossier (Wells in press). The Neo-Babylonian empire is not exceptional in having developed an administration with a rational-bureaucratic component that was nested within an overall patrimonial setting, neither in its own ‘native’ Near Eastern setting nor in world-historical perspective. However, it does seem that in comparison to other pre-modern patrimonial-bureaucratic empires, this rational-bureaucratic component was unusually well developed.68

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