State Archives of Assyria Bulletin

ISSN 1120-4699

Volume XVIII 2009 2010

State Archives of Assyria Bulletin - Volume XVIII, 2009 2010 Editors: Frederick Mario Fales, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi Assistant Editor: Simonetta Ponchia Legally Responsible Director: Ines Thomas Published by: S.A.R.G.O.N. Editrice e Libreria, Via Induno 18/A, I-35134 Padova (Italy) Distributed exclusively by: Herder Editrice e Libreria Piazza Montecitorio 117/120 I-00186 Roma, Italy

TABLE OF CONTENTS JAUME LLOP, The Food of the Gods. MARV 3, 16, a Middle Assyrian Offerings List to the Great Gods of the City of Assur .......................................................................... 1 RAN ZADOK, The Archive of ulmu-arri from Dr-Katlimmu ...................................... 47 SALVATORE GASPA, Organizing the Festive Cycles at the Aur Temple: Royal Dispositions for the Provision and Processing of Foodstuffs in First Millennium BC Assyria .................................................................................................................. 91 GRETA VAN BUYLAERE, The Role of the a mui li in the Neo-Assyrian Empire .... 145 FREDERICK MARIO FALES, On Assyrian Lower-stratum Families ............................. 163 ODED TAMMUZ, The Expansion of the Kingdom of Damascus under Rezin and Its Aftermath: A Case Study on the Mining of Concealed Information from Propagandistic Sources............................................................................................ 187 STEFAN ZAWADZKI, AMAR, Br, Bru and Apladad: One or Many? ............................. 205 DAVIDE NADALI, Neo-Assyrian State Seals: An Allegory of Power ............................. 215 NICOLAS GILLMANN, Le temple de Muair, une nouvelle tentative de restitution ....... 245 FABRICE DE BACKER, Some Basic Tactics of Neo-Assyrian Warfare ........................... 265

Editore: S.A.R.G.O.N. Editrice e Libreria Via Induno 18/A I-35134 Padova (Italy) Stampa: Copisteria Stecchini Via Santa Sofia 5862 I-35121 Padova (Italy) Direttore responsabile: Ines Thomas Finito di stampare il 23 giugno 2011

State Archives of Assyria Bulletin Volume XVIII (20092010)

ON ASSYRIAN LOWER-STRATUM FAMILIES * Frederick Mario Fales

1. One of the basic turnstiles of historical research on all periods concerns problems of relevance of the available data vis--vis the theoretical questions that the historian may pose. Are the data in themselves appropriate for an adequate framing of specific historical issues? How did the primary/original sources present, or filter, such data, and what meanings were attached to them in the sources themselves? Which are the possible guidelines to be brought forth from the data for their historical interpretation, and what implications do these guidelines hold in a general assessment of historical development over time, even down to a world-view of the present? As one who has long toyed with the problems of social and economic history of the Assyrian empire, as viewed from below, i.e. in the day-to-day textual record of this period,1 and has attempted on his own to derive some sense from the quantitative data involved,2 this writer is particularly empathetic with the complexities arising from the questions listed above, that Gershon Galil had to face in preparing his vast monographic work on The Lower Stratum Families in the Neo-Assyrian Period. Galils work consists essentially in the exhaustive mining of the Neo-Assyrian (NA) everyday (mainly legal and administrative) archives in search of data whether in complete or fragmentary condition on families of the lower stratum of society of the age, from which a multi-dimensional quantitative breakdown of 447 kinship units in terms of size, composition by age and sex, patterns of presence/absence, overall inner proportions is derived.3 In particular, Galils collection (as the first half of a project which
* 1 2 3 Review-article of G. Galil, The Lower Stratum Families in the Neo-Assyrian Period (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 27), Leiden Boston (Brill) 2007, xii+ 403 pp. Fales 2001. Fales 1975; 1990; 1996. This writer considers Galils study as broadly connected to quantitative history and specifically to socio-demographic historical research which began with the New Social History in the Anglo-

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will in the future also be extended to the contemporaneous upper-stratum households) comprises not only the documents which had been already subjected in the past to social-demographic analysis, such as the Harran census 4 and the texts from the Auenhaken of Assur,5 but it encompasses every shred of written evidence in the NA corpus of the late 8th7th centuries BC published before 2006 6 in which numerical information on lower-stratum family groups is available, for a total of 177 texts. Doubtlessly, the level of aggregation and dissection of information reached by Galil is unprecedented as far as NA studies are concerned, and in a wider view one may well agree with the words of a previous reviewer, that the result is perhaps the most thorough analysis of lower-stratum ancient Near Eastern families ever produced.7 *** After a general introduction (= pp. 118; on which cf. in detail below, 2), the analysis of lower stratum families in Assyrian everyday texts is divided into two main parts. Part I (Chaps. 13 = pp. 19258) is devoted to a presentation of the evidence along three vast guidelines: sources, overall survey of the families, and their general social status. Part II, in its multiple short subdivisions (Chaps. 411 = pp. 259341), holds the actual quantitative analysis of this evidence according to a variety of standpoints. The available sources (legal, administrative, and other) are listed in great detail in Chapter 1 (pp. 1931) by type and date, provenience and publication, even down to the history of research in its various phases. Two further appendixes (A = pp. 3244; B = pp. 4546) provide all necessary concordances to this material, resp. by type and date, and by geographical setting. Having thus set the stage, in Chapter 2 (= pp. 47155) Galil introduces the seven distinct groupings of people attested in the documentation, to which all subsequent calculations will be applied.8 Such groupings are: (A) slaves, (B) pledged persons, (C) persons enumerated in sales and lists of land and people; (D) persons mentioned in royal grants; (E) persons listed in the so-called Harran

4 5 6 7 8

Saxon world and with a specific development of the Annales school in France (cf. Fales 1975: 325f. for references, although now fatally outdated). Fales 1973; 1975; 2001: 170178; Roth 1987. kerman 1999-2001. And even unpublished texts, such as those from the archive of Maallanate in northern Syria, are quoted to the extent that the information was available; see now, for the Aramaic documents from this site, Lipiski 2010. For further Assur documents, see now Faist 2007. Moore 2009. See also Baker 2008; Radner 2008, for other reviews with critical notes. A brief anticipation of such groupings was already given on p. 23 in chapter 1.

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census; (F) persons occurring in lists of deportees and displaced persons; (G) recipients of rations.10 This is followed by a long and elaborate reading-out of the 117 documents regarding lower-stratum families, in the order of the above groupings; the relevant quantitative data are thereupon summarized by totals, sex/age, date of the text in 17 tables (= pp. 156187). This is the very heart of the book, bearing the basic numerical evidence to which reference will be made in the second part of the work. Chapter 3 presents, in its constituent sections (AG, pp. 188258) an analysis of the social and professional terminology applied to the family groups. In practice, in this chapter the reader finds the basic support for the subdivision in 7 groupings of people which had already been effected in the previous chapter. To get down to details: the families of group (A), characterized by a finite number of NA terms for slave, are treated in a relatively straightforward way (pp. 188199). Difficulties start, instead, with group (B) of families ceded in pledge against their own or others unsolved debts (pp. 199205), since Galil introduces here the first of a number of discussions with a matter that seems to haunt him: to what extent these pledged people were originally slaves or free.11 The same modus operandi is applied to group (C), sales of land and people (= pp. 205-=210): since these family groups sold contextually with land for various agricultural activities were rarely defined as slaves but much more often as people, their exact legal status is a problem discussed by Galil at some length, the conclusion of this section (p. 210) thus runs as follows: Is it possible that the people enumerated in sales of Land and People were not slaves? On the one hand, it seams (sic) impossible, since they were sold together with the land and it looks like there is no difference between them and the other items presented in the operative sections of these texts: fields, houses, vineyards, vegetable gardens, etc. Moreover, the owner of the property is presented not only as the owner of the land, but also as the owner of the people
9 Galil correctly separates the single texts going back to the two scribes (A and B) involved in the Harran Census, as established by Parpola 1974 (to which the notes by Fales, in Fales Postgate 1995, Introduction, xxxiii-xxxiv should be added). The differences between the two, however, are statistically relevant only for childrens ages and the number of daughters both items being attested in the texts of A but not in those of B. 10 It may be noted that the data by geographical setting given in the previous chapter on pp. 4546, which are relevant with few exceptions to various cities in provinces in Inner Assyria, exclusively concern groups C, D, and E. 11 Cf. e.g. p. 204: In sum, a few people were evidently slaves before they were pledged, while others were free persons, or pledged people who were re-pledged. The free people were put into pledge by their family head, in most cases their father, and in others their husband or brother, and they are defined by their relation to the family head (his son, his wife, etc.).

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being sold. On the other hand, this possibility is problematic, since if the people enumerated in sales of Land and People were also slaves, one would expect that a same terminology will be used to define the sold people in both sales of people and of Land and People, but this is not the case (see discussion above) The issue is indeed very problematic and complicated, and it is even unclear whether the status of all the people enumerated in sales of Land and People was the same. In my opinion, although a few families listed in these texts might be slaves, most people attested in sales of Land and People were probably tenants. Matters change little with group (D), relevant to families listed (again often with land) within royal grants (pp. 211214). In this small corpus the occasional presence of a clause stating the explicit exemption from ilku may, in effect, raise the issue of whether the families would have been otherwise obliged to perform the relevant duties but whether they did so as their own obligation (i.e. as tenants) or in lieu of their owners (if slaves) is unclear. Now we get to the important group (E) of the texts of the so-called Harran Census: here Galil starts out by proposing anew the breakdown of the evidence established over the years (Fales 1973; Parpola 1974; Fales & Postgate 1995, Introduction). As is well known, this collection of texts bears continuous registers of individual properties owned by middle-to-high rank officials, located here and there in the countryside of Harran. The registers present, for each holding, the detail relevant to one or more resident families, alongside fields or vineyards, animals, and rural buildings or fixtures and thus bear many structural analogies with the legal documents of groups (C ) and (D), where people and land are equally lumped together. However, since a mere two (out of dozens) of the families listed in the Harran Census are described as having small assets of their own (a rmniunu), Galil grants the status of tenants aspiring to freedom to the entire work force of the corpus (pp. 223224): So these cultivators, most probably tenants, are allowed to accumulate land and oxen, namely means of production, and are apparently independent peasants; yet they are still tenants who cultivate land owned mainly by the members of the middle and upper strata in the Neo-Assyrian Empire; one might suggest that in their eyes they already see a glimmer of light in the darkness, and they seem to be on the high road to complete economic independence.

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And at this point, Galil unveils for the reader a truly unprecedented picture of Assyrian rural tenancy as a non-obligatory, and in fact willingly accepted, status, insofar as dependence from a powerful landowner meant having a roof overhead and a certain amount of protektsia against hostile forces outside (p. 224, italics by this writer): But it is most important that these two families that managed to accumulate enough land to maintain themselves continued to function as tenants and to cultivate land owned by others. They did so probably not because they were obliged to cultivate these fields or forced to serve their masters, but because tenancy was an important anchor in their life, which provided more economic stability and was insurance against bad times, a shelter from drought and hunger, as well as from powerful wicked neighbors or corrupt officials who might take over the land accumulated by these tenants through hard work and diligence. Galil s reconstruction is certainly timely, in an age which is bringing to light the many implications of patrimonialism and clientship in the Ancient Near East,12 but this writer does not believe it may be applied here. While having long renounced the totally opposite, and equally sweeping, view that the Assyrian countryside was manned in its entirety by glebae adscripti,13 he however still believes that the specific selection of landed holdings owned by, or assigned in prebend to, members of the master class which formed the so-called Harran census was manned by menial labour forces which had no way of choosing, and little possibility of renouncing, their condition of long-term bondage to the land whether because they had been enslaved through debt, had been pledged together with the properties, or were deportees installed on the farms.14 Exactly the group of deportees and displaced persons which we have come to know quite well from the thorough analyses by one of Galils mentors, Bustenay Oded15 is next presented by Galil as Group F (pp. 224226). The author defines them as people who were previously of the middle stratum but now they are deportees in transit, and the position they will be assigned to by the Assyrian administration is not clear (p. 225), while previously (p. 13) he had pointed out that most of the deportees were appar12 Cf. e.g. Schloen 2001; Westbrook 2005. 13 Also on the basis of the reasonable remarks on a presumably ample differentiation in the types of landownership by J.N. Postgate in his review-article on Fales 1973 (Postgate 1974, and esp. 236 240). 14 This subdivision of the subordinate labour forces in the Assyrian rural landscape takes after a suggestion by Postgate himself, in an essay of a much later date than the previously quoted one, which thus represents something of a correction to the three-tiered model previously espoused (Postgate 1989: 151152). 15 Cf. Oded 1979, and more recently Oded 2010.

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ently placed as tenants on lands owned by the king or his officials. Thus, while employing a somewhat elastic use of the term tenant, Galil also seems to occasionally share others doubts about the actual degree of juridical and economic liberty which the families listed together with land, animals, and rural facilities could have enjoyed.16 Finally, this chapter comes to a close with a section (G) on the order of attestation of the women in the families (pp. 226228), and three appendixes (AC, pp. 228256) bearing synopses of the formulae employed in the different types of texts. The data and the conclusions drawn in section G will be discussed with the remainder of the quantitative evidence in 3, below. 2. As seen above, the problem of the social/juridical position of the families listed in these everyday NA texts (in the wide majority of legal or administrative nature) is one to which Galil devotes particular energy in his intention to circumscribe and bring to light a lower stratum of Assyrian society the layer beneath the privileged sector which either actually formed, or depended directly from, the civilian and military administration of the Empire. This issue is first outlined in the introduction to the book (= pp. 115), where Galil presents the alternative possibility of a three- or two-tiered stratification of NA society. The alternatives may be thus summarized: beneath the (a) upper class/stratum, should we view the existence of a (b) middle class, formed by free farmers and craftsmen, and thereupon of (c) a truly lower class, devoid of means of production and engaged in work for the benefit of its masters? Or should we instead rather consider a merely binary subdivision of the form (a)/(b) + (c), i.e. between the privileged and empowered ruling class and a vast body of subordinates, in variable and even fluctuating degrees of economic and legal subjection? Now, discussion concerning this choice of socio-economic models may be retrieved throughout the secondary literature on the NA period: a literature which has grown exponentially in the last 40-odd years, from the time that NA studies developed as an autonomous branch of Assyriology endowed with its particular standards and guidelines thanks to the pioneering and masterly philological-linguistic contributions by Karlheinz Deller17, and especially after numerous specialists undertook the detailed investigation of the legal and administrative documents of the period, as potential keys to the structure of late Assyrian society. As a result, a classification of most of these documents within their functional and chronological groupings was developed and generally accepted by the 1970s and early 1980s, on the basis of data from the older Nineveh archives and the newly discovered corpus from Nimrud-Kalhu;18 at the same time, the
16 The subject of deportees and their destination has been taken up in greater detail in Galil 2009. 17 See especialy Deller 1961; 1965; 1966. 18 Cf. e.g. Postgate 1969; Kinnier Wilson 1972; Fales 1973; Postgate 1973; Dalley Postgate 1984.

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interpretation of the basic legal and procedural mechanisms behind their particular wordings and layouts was attained.19 This entire phase may be viewed as culminating with the updated re-edition of the entire corpus of administrative and legal texts from Nineveh, with the publication of a number of business archives from private houses in Assur, and with the retrieval of new corpora of similar documents from various provincial sites in Syria, between the 1990s and the beginning of the present millennium mainly in Assyrian, but also in Aramaic.20 To be sure, in comparison with this vast body of editorial work, direct research on the socio-economic history of the period (and in particular on the forms and models of social and economic relationships) nowadays appears somewhat sidelined, after a certain peak in the 1970s and 1980s.21 This development might be in general connected to the decline of planetary bipolarism and the fading of its attendant ideological oppositions in worldwide culture; in any case, it has entailed the present shift to a more introspective gaze on the NA sources, aimed at bringing forth and solving the many minute intricacies and micro-historical implications of the written record. In this sense, of course, Galils attempt to revive discussion on some basic socio-economic themes in NA history which have been neglected of late is entirely commendable, although he dwells only sparingly with the state of research thereon. Galil pinpoints the opposition between a three- and a two-tiered social stratification by relying on a pair of vast and authoritative perspectives of social relations throughout Ancient Near Eastern history. Thus, the three-tiered hypothesis is referred back to Soviet researchers, continuing in the path of Karl Marx, including Jakobson, Diakonoff, and Dandamaev,22 who viewed the intermediate sector of free peasants and craftsmen as fully extant, along clear-cut guidelines regarding the ownership of the means of production and the division of labor. The two-tiered view is instead connected to the economic-historical studies of I.J. Gelb,23 who beneath a master class envisaged semi-free serfs and slaves as forming altogether a vast subordinate class, to which even so-called free peasantry and craftsmen were sooner or later forced to adhere.24
19 Postgate 1976 and later Radner 1999. 20 Cf. Fales 1986; Kwasman Parpola 1991; Fales Jakob-Rost 1991; Fales Postgate 1992; 1995; Kataja Whiting 1995; Deller Fales et Al. 1995; Dalley 199697; Radner 1999; Donbaz Parpola 2001; Radner 2002; Mattila 2002; Fales et Al. 2005; Lipiski 2010. 21 One may quote, e.g., van Driel 1970; Zablocka 1972; Fales 1973; 1984; Postgate 1974a; 1974b; 1989; Peirkova 1978; Liverani 1984. 22 See essentially Diakonoff 1974; 1975; Jakobson 1969; 1969a; Dandamaev 1984. 23 Galil refers essentially to Gelb 1972 and secondarily to other studies by the same scholar, to which Gelb 1980 might also be added. 24 For a decided two-tiered model, but along the different lines of an opposition between Palace and Family, cf. Liverani 1984, and the recent appraisal by Bedford 2009: 38.

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And which of these two approaches does Galil himself favor? The author tackles the preliminary issue of exactly to what extent such general perspectives may be considered adaptable to the specifics of the NA historical context. His position (p. 3) shows that he believes such an adaptation implicitly possible: In my study I divided society in the Neo-Assyrian Empire into two main strata: the lower stratum on the one hand, and the middle and upper stratum on the other. The main yardstick for this division was ownership of means of production. People assigned to the lower stratum were in the great majority of cases (with a few exceptions) devoid of means of production. Similarly, this stratum did not serve in the royal administration, not even as low-level officials. By contrast, members of the middle and upper stratum were owners of the means of production, and most of them did serve in the royal administration, on its various levels, in both the palace and the temple sectors. The existence of free peasants and of free craftsmen in the period under discussion cannot be denied. Poor peasants were forced to sell their land, usually to wealthy Assyrian officials, who sometimes purchased entire villages. But free peasants endured, usually the strong and well based ones who managed to survive and did not lose their land. As for the yardstick of organization of labor, and exploitation of the labor of members of other classes people belonging to the lower stratum (tenants, slaves, and wage-laborers) indeed worked in productive labor, and their masters and employers benefited from their labor. However, at least regarding some of the tenants, we shall try to suggest a rather different definition of the nature of the economic ties between them and the owners of the land they tilled, and I am not convinced that the Marxist term exploitation defines the essence of these relations well. Galil is certainly aware of the apparent contradiction of pleading for an intermediate (or middle-class) sector of imperial society formed by free landowners and craftsmen in village communities (The existence of free peasants and of free craftsmen in the period under discussion cannot be denied), when dealing at the same time with texts that illustrate a free-for-all takeover of land throughout the empire on the part of officials and military close to the Crown and presumably at extremely convenient prices (poor peasants were forced to sell their land, usually to wealthy Assyrian officials, who sometimes purchased entire villages). However, he tries to dodge the pitfalls of such a contradiction by maintaining that free peasants endured, usually the strong and well based ones who managed to survive and did not lose their land. ***

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In point of fact, this writer agrees with Galil that the three-tiered and the two-tiered model did, to a certain extent, exist coterminously within the Assyrian empire but proceeding from a different starting-point and with the use of other sets of data. In his opinion, this double socio-economic standard is borne out, purely and simply, by a realistic historical-geographical assessment: the constant territorial accretion of the land of Assur through the centuries did not, and could not, entail the complete steamrolling of all local socio-economic conditions and traditions, but must have also comprised a certain degree of adaptation of the empires benchmarks to the particular status of the subjected communities25. In practice, therefore, a number of territorial niches organized around village and micro-urban communities and thus endowed with partially autonomous institutions should have survived, either as remnants of 2nd millennium settlement policies, or as testimonials to indigenous, non-Mesopotamian, socio-economic developments.26 In other words, the Assyrian Palace must have taken into account the socio-economic potential of these particular three-tiered niches, at the same time as it was administrating the vast landed holdings that it had parcelled out to its main officials in the Jezirah, which were manned to a certain extent by masses of personnel of fully subordinate and most probably servile condition, at times even for life i.e. in a two-tiered fashion. Evidence for this pliant approach on the part of the Assyrian administration in dealing with a double socio-economic model (and perhaps even a triple one, if we also consider the presence of tribal segments within the empire, such as the Arameans27 and the Arabs28) is certainly not lacking nowadays: the 3000-odd letters sent to the Sargonid kings by their subordinates do, in fact, hint to a number of subjected territories which the Assyrians were called to incorporate within the imperial administrative structure as is, i.e. with their village and urban institutions largely intact, for strategic rea-

25 Possibly the best illustration of this phenomenon regards the mechanisms of Assyrian management of the Zagros areas, where the provincial system seems to overlay the existing administrative structure of many bl lis: cf. e.g. Radner 2003; Lanfranchi 2003. 26 A case in point is that of the inhabitants of adikanni, of whom king Sargon shows outright suspicion, because they do not seem to be available at the royal roll call, thus prompting the local governor to justify them, recalling their particular work habits: The king my lord knows that the people of adikanni are hirelings; they work for hire all over the kings lands. They are no runaways; they perform the ilku-duty and supply kings men from their midst (SAA 1 223: 413). On the political and economic autonomy of numerous communities within the NA empire, the survey by Barjamovic 2004 (not quoted by Galil) is of great interest. 27 On the Arameans, cf. the vast monographic overview by Lipiski 2000, and most recently Fales 2007, with previous bibliography. 28 For the economic relation with the Arabs, cf. Elat 1998; for the letters concerning Assyrian-Arab relations, cf. Fales 2002; for the trade routes through northwestern Arabia, cf. Byrne 2003; for the links with the Gulf area, cf. Fales 2010.

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sons or to be able to enforce pax assyriaca more efficiently.29 To be sure, this does not mean disregarding the ample references to the Assyrians opposite policy, that of uprooting entire local communities through deportation and displacement.30 At the end of the day, then, Galils plaidoyer for a harmonization of the views of Diakonoff with those of Gelb is not really necessary, because similar conclusions may be reached with an in-depth, and at the same time wide-ranging look at the textual evidence of the time; in this writers opinion, the presence of an intermediate layer of free peasants and craftsmen here and there within the maze-like socio-economic structure of the Assyrian empire is not to be really questioned. Rather, we may ask: to what extent can this layer be truly and clearly detected within the texts bearing family statistics that Galil has assembled, and which concern sales of persons with or without pledge-clauses (Galils AB groups), cadasters of land and people belonging to Assyrian officials which were written out for tax-exemption purposes, or as appendixes to royal grants (C E), deportees (F), and persons receiving rations from the Palace (G)? Or, to broaden the issue: to what extent can a sophisticated social picture of the NA lower stratum be brought forth from the bare family statistics themselves, without the need of superimposing upon the latter a preconceived idea of how Assyrian society should have worked? 3. To answer this question, let us now finally tackle the second part of Galils vast treatise, relevant to the quantitative analysis of the 447 families present in the 7 named textual groups within the everyday corpus from the NA empire. The relevant chapters are numerous but usually short, as said above, and regard different statistical issues: family type (chapter 4 = pp. 259272), family size (chapter 5 = pp. 273291), marriage patterns (chapter 6 = pp. 292301), childless families (chapter 7 = pp. 302308), childrens age (chapter 8 = pp. 309318), single-parent families (chapter 9 = pp. 319326), numerical proportions among family members (chapter 10 = pp. 327333), number of generations in the family (chapter 11 = pp. 334341). These different issues are well described, and altogether analyzed in extreme detail, with the aid of numerous partial or comprehensive statistical tables.31 Galil starts out by studying the different family types within his evidence (pp. 259ff.). He first subdivides families into three main groups (A = nuclear families; B = extended families; and C = multiple-family kinship groups), each of which are further split according to subtypes. The most interesting data (also due to the greater quantities involved) concern nuclear families centered in theory around two parents and their offspring. In point of fact,
29 On pax assyriaca, cf. most recently Fales 2008, with previous bibliography. 30 Cf. fns. 15 and 16, above, adding also Fales 2006. 31 There are 39 such tables in the book, listed on pp. xixii.

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however, the concretely documented cases in the everyday NA texts are more complex. Galil sets out 5 subtypes, as follows: (A1) a childless married couple or a childless man married to several women; (A2) a married couple with unmarried child/children, or a man married to several women with unmarried child/children; (A3) a man (divorced or widower) with his child or children; (A4) an unmarried, divorced, or widowed woman with her child or children; (A5) a childless man (unmarried, divorced, or widower) with his mother or with his mother and unmarried brother(s) and sister(s). In practice, then, the classic nuclear family is only the A2 type (with mono- and polygamous variants), whereas all the others show the lack of one of the parents or the offspring, in various combinations. How are the various types of nuclear families distributed in the different groups of texts? This is, of course, a quite interesting point, since the various contexts might help elucidate the problem of the quantitative incompleteness within the different family types. In his enjoyable study of the book, this writer has thus prepared first and foremost for his own benefit a number of quite elementary computer-generated graphs which may be here reproduced for the purpose of setting Galils results in clearer evidence. The data just discussed may thus be presented as follows (Chart 1):

Chart 1. NA family types: nuclear families (A). Absolute quantities by text groupings for each subtype (A1-A5). Source: Galil 2007, Table 21 (p. 263).

And the same data may be given in another visualization (chart 2):

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Chart 2. NA family types : nuclear families (A).Graph of relative percentages on a common base (100%), by text type (with quantities) for each family subtype (A1-A5). Source: Galil 2007, Table 21 (p. 263).

What do these two charts show? It may be noticed that there is a fairly clear prevalence of slave families over all other text groups in subtypes A1 and A4, i.e. in those nuclear families lacking children (A1) and husbands (A4), whereas the classic nuclear family (A2, double-parent with children) is best-attested in the Harran census, leaving all other text groups at a much lower level. Are we thereby meant to understand that at times children could be separated from their parents in slave sales, and that at other times women could be sold with their children separately from their husbands? Possibly so, in this writers opinion; although it is surely not irrelevant to note, for better or for worse, that the slave sales and the Harran census provide the two most sizable corpuses for NA family statistics in the absolute, distancing greatly and possibly to a statistically significant extent the remainder of the evidence, as the following double graph (chart 3a-b) shows:

Chart 3. NA families: grand totals by text type, in percentage. Source: Galil 2007, Table 21 (p. 263).

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Some of this information is supplied by Galils chapter on family size (pp. 273ff.). Negotiating his way through an admittedly complex (because partially fragmentary) body of data, the author outlines the varying size of the family groups in the different corpuses, with the aid of individual statistical tables (pp. 274, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 285, 287) and then of a comprehensive array (p. 289). To give an idea of the overall size of the recorded families (from 15 to 2 members, in descending order), while at the same time showing that once more the smallest families (2 members) derive mainly from the slave sales, this writer has put together the following graph from Galils data (Chart 4). At a close look, this chart shows that the truly significant data (let us say, those with a minimum of 10 attestations per text group) are in point of fact limited to families with 5 or less members. Basically the same result may be gained through a further graph (chart 5), which indicates the number of attested families in relation to family size again in descending order with their total components. As may be seen, then, there is a decided leap in significance of the data once the 5-member family is reached (43 attested cases, i.e. at least 2.5 times more than those of the families with 6 or more members), also because the totals of the people involved now attain some 200 individuals and will stay around the same level for the families with smaller composition, actually peaking at 232 people for the 2-member families.

Chart 4. Family size, by decreasing number of members (x-axis) and number of cases attested (y-axis), in the different textual groups. Source: Galil 2007, Table 24 (p. 274).

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Chart 5. Family size, by decreasing number of members (x-axis, large numbers) and quantities of attested families, with people (y-axis and small numbers). Source: Galil 2007, Table 24 (p. 274).

As for the average family size in each text group, Galils summary of all the evidence may be presented as in chart 6. We may start out here from a point of detail. Chart 6 not only shows that, as Galil himself states (p. 288), the average family size of recipients of rations is the smallest (2.31), but that this text group is widely divergent in its statistical outlook from all the others. In fact, as may be seen from charts 1 and 2, its main component is the nuclear family A4 (a single-parent family headed by a woman); one thus wonders if it should actually considered a significant element in the overall quantitative assessment of family size. To be sure, by eliminating this text group entirely, as in the following graph (chart 7), the total average of family size grows a bit (from 3.71 to 3.76), and the remaining averages are mutually distanced to a decidedly smaller degree.

Chart 6. Family size, average by groups and total. Source: Galil 2007, Table 32 (p. 289).

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Chart 7. Family size, average by groups and total, without the RATIONS group. Same source as previous chart.

Even with this modification, however, there is no doubt that the overall statistical picture painted by these averages is that of families of very small size albeit with substantial differences among text groups. The slave families also due to their abundant (female) single-parent composition noted above show an overall profile of totally negative reproduction prospects (only 3.18 average size, i.e. barely one child per family). Equally negative, but to a less degree, are the reproduction prospects of the land and people (3.29), pledged (3.79) and grants (3.96) group; whereas the only groups in which two parents yield an equivalent offspring are the Harran census (4.06) and the deportees (4.56). However, the possible causes of such fluctuations among groups remain a matter of speculation: death in childbirth, infant diseases, and environmental hazards may be invoked to the same degree (i.e. with no concrete proof) as purely social and economic and specifically work conditions. Galil limits himself to pointing out (p. 288) that all these low averages are particularly striking if compared to the contemporaneous statistics of the upper-stratum households, which show averages of 5 to 6 people: we await his next book for the relevant data to back this assertion. Apart from this point, however, this writer considers that the real issue of a statistical worth and of true novelty in Galils vast discussion on the size of NA families regards the chronological fluctuations of the above averages. As Galil points out, one of the main conclusions of this chapter is the manifest reduction in the size of the families after 680 BC compared with the size before 681 BC. The size of the average family in the earlier period is 4.36, and in the later it is 2.79. This result is indeed intriguing, insofar as it runs through all text groups yielding data for both phases, as may be shown through the following graph (chart 8).

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Chart 8. Family size: comparative percentages before and after 680 BC in attested groups (with total). Source: Galil 2007, Tables 3334 (pp. 290291).

What reasons may be found for this manifest reduction in average family size after 680 BC, which brought, on average, all the lower-stratum NA families to have fully negative reproduction prospects, in fact to tend toward self-extinction (0.79 children per family)? Galil (p. 288) notes that the differences with the previous phase cannot be accidental. They probably indicate the weakening and reduction in size of the families of the lower stratum on the one hand, and the strengthening of the middle and upper strata at the expense of the lower stratum at the zenith of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, mainly in the reigns of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. On his part, this writer would rather plead for an elementary and timeless demographic perspective: if the record of a pre-modern population shows a trend in family size tending to non-reproductive decline (1 child or less per family), then it stands to reason that either single decimating circumstances (wars, epidemics, natural catastrophes, etc.) or long-term health/social effects (famine, environmental hazards, state of captivity, etc.) were involved. In the NA case, the sharp decline in family size brought to light by Galil involves the 70-odd years from Esarhaddons ascent to the throne to the fall of Nineveh: for the category of slaves (which shows the greatest single rate of decline, from 4.39 to 2.59 family members on average) it is difficult not to imagine that the condition of longterm captivity may have acted as a disincentive for reproduction, although it remains unclear why this factor would have increased its effect during the 7th century. For the remaining groups, insofar as a non-free condition may be surmised, either a similar negative motivation was at work, or the effects of warfare (or other specifically ruinous factors) made themselves felt. In any case, even with no quick and easy explanation at hand, it remains striking to note that demographic decline accompanied (or perhaps even preceded) the political descent of the Assyrian empire from zenith to nadir.

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*** A further point of interest in Galils statistical part of the book is that of the numerical proportions within the NA family, studied in Chapter 10 (pp. 327ff.). The quantitative relation between the sexes, and that between age groups on a general total of 580 individuals within 181 families is treated with competence and in great detail by the author. Unfortunately, however, the conclusions offered by Galil are less eventful than could have been expected: the author sums up the situation by noting purely and simply that there is almost a balance between males and females (p. 330). This is true, but the final count the men exceed the women by 4%, which is something of a demographic oddity, especially in a historical scenario such as that of the Assyrian Empire, which did not exclude the frequent recourse to war and/or to hard (male) labor. Greater justice to the statistics painstakingly assembled by Galil on p. 330 may thus perhaps be done through the four following graphs (charts 912). By charting resp. the proportions between adult man and women, those between young men and young women, and the overall proportion between the sexes, with a final synopsis of the relevant data, these graphs show that the total proportion in percentage by sex of all adults is, in effect, relatively in line with those of the individual groups (save for the rations corpus), i.e. with a decided prevalence of women. On the other hand, however, relatively great variations in percentages occur between sons and daughters in some text groups, thus bringing the young men to prevail over young women by some 5%. Thus, in the end, it is this imbalance in the younger population that causes the total of all men to be some 4% greater than that of all women.32

Chart 9. Percentage proportions between adult men and women, by text groups. Source: Galil 2007, 332f., Table 37.
32 The attentive reader may encounter some slight variations on the calculations attested in Galils table; every percentage has been recalculated by this writer on the basis of the figures given therein.

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Chart 10. Percentage proportions between sons and daughters, by text groups. Source: Galil 2007, 332f., Table 37.33

Chart 11. Percentage proportions between all men and all women, by text groups. Source: Galil 2007, 332f., Table 37).

So, where have all the young girls gone, long time passing as the old folk song used to say? The significant gap relevant to the quantities of young women in comparison with young men charted from Galils data is admittedly rather difficult to explain as such. However, as the author himself points aptly out (pp. 330331), the same general proportions between sexes and between ages recur in a single inventory from Nineveh, which was republished in 1995 by this writer and J.N. Postgate: the list of deportees SAA XI 167. This list has the further advantage of providing a clear breakdown of the young people of both sexes by age groups, indicated according to the mixed system which
33 Since Scribe B of the Harran Census (cf. fn. 9, above) does not single out the daughters from the overall women, only the data of Scribe A has been charted here. The percentages in the totals of this chart thus do not refer to 580 individuals, but only to 542, i.e. minus the 38 individuals listed by Scribe B.

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Chart 12. Synopsis of the variations in percentages by sexes and age groups in charts 911, above. Source: Galil 2007, 332f., Table 37.

represents the standard for this period, i.e. by (a) dependence on the mother (suckling/ weaned) and by (b) height, in spans, as well summarized in Chapter VIII (pp. 309ff.). Galil singles out the fact that SAA XI 167 does not give a breakdown by families, differently from the other texts studied by him; but points out that, nonetheless, The relation between sons and daughters in SAA XI 167 is similar to that in the group of 181 [previously studied] families (p. 331). Specifically, in the following two graphs (charts 13 and 14), this writer has shown that the youngest ages from suckling to 3 spans( height) present little or no difference between the sexes, with females even prevailing over males; whereas from 4 spans onward, the number of females decreases radically (chart 13). Admittedly, adult women are more than men in this text; but the decrease in teen-age girls causes at the end the men to be more than the women (chart 14). This final result is thus exactly the same as in the families studied in the main text by Galil: it is the quantity of missing girls that causes males to prevail over females in the final count. Now, while admittedly each and every partial result in the overall record assembled by Galil may be considered not immune from doubt over its statistical significance, here the possibility that the daughters were few because they had been diverted to other destinations may be openly suggested. In sum, similarly to the conclusions tentatively reached on the basis of charts 12 above, a specific case of deviation from the norm might also here imply the forced reduction of specific population groups through an act of demographic selection. In both these cases, the suspicion that original family groups were subjected to a policy of outright separation in view of varying destinations may be raised.

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Chart 13. Proportions (integers) between all men and all women in SAA XI 167. Source: Galil 2007, pp. 330f.

Chart 14. Synopsis of the variations (integers) by sexes and age groups in SAA XI 167. Source: Galil 2007, pp. 330f.

4. These two cases of womens disappearance, when compared to the unexplained, yet quite manifest, reduction of family groups in the 7th century seen above, have one facet in common: they do not seem, on the face of it, to apply to free demographic choices and movements, but to structures of social coercion. To be sure, in his conclusive Summary, Galil leaves the door open for a number of broad socio-economic motivations (lack of manpower in general; desire of the kings to split up the latifundia so as to limit the nobilitys powers; etc.) that might be viewed in the background of some of the studied statistical structures. However, the single chapters of this vast and thor-

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oughly documented analytical work do not express all possible historical perspectives to be drawn from the many snapshots of specific social situations he has brought forth and organized in a truly formidable mass of quantitative tables.34 It must be admitted, on the other hand, that Galil planned the present study as the first half of a full-fledged analysis of Assyrian society by statistical means: all readers may thus look forward with interest to a full rounding-out of the social picture of the Neo-Assyrian empire, to be achieved by the promised survey of the contemporaneous master class. And conclusively, this writer cannot but be thankful to Gershon Galil for having taken up again a subject most dear to his own research interests,35 with this extremely careful and comprehensive elaboration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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34 This writer is forced to note that the Editors of the prestigious series Culture and History of the Ancient Near East do not seem to have faced the problem of providing adequate typographical inputs for Galils dense and complex tables of numerical data throughout the book. An appropriate dosage of different font types, or at least of different styles (roman, bold and italic characters) would have greatly benefited the interested reader. 35 Galil very kindly states in the Introduction (p. 14) that Faless [1975] work is of great importance, and I regard mine as a continuation of his on the specific subject. On my part this writer can only hope to have done sufficient justice to his ample and detailed work through the present contribution.

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