Archives

GRAECA TERGESTINA STORIA E CIVILT 1

copyright Edizioni Universit di Trieste, Trieste 2013.

Propriet letteraria riservata.I diritti di traduzione, memorizzazione elettronica, diriproduzione e di adattamento totale e parziale di questapubblicazione, con qualsiasi mezzo (compresi i microfilm,le fotocopie e altro) sono riservati per tutti i paesi.

ISBN 978-88-8303-460-2

EUT - Edizioni Universit di TriesteVia Weiss, 21 34127 Triestehttp://eut.units.it

Legal Documents in Ancient Societies

www.ldas-conf.com

Steering Committee: Sophie Dmare-Lafont, Mark Depauw, Michele Faraguna, va Jakab, Dennis P. Kehoe, Uri Yiftach-Firanko

Con il contributo di:

Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universit e della RicercaPRIN 2008 La burocrazia greca: definizione e funzionamento dei procedimenti amministrativi nel mondo antico

Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Universit degli Studi di Trieste

Legal Documents in Ancient Societies IV

Archives and Archival Documents in Ancient SocietiesTrieste 30 September-1 October 2011

edited byMichele Faraguna

EUT EDIZIONI UNIVERSIT DI TRIESTE

4Contents

Michele Faraguna (Trieste) 7 Foreword

Dennis Kehoe (New Orleans) 11 Archives and Archival Documents

in Ancient Societies: Introduction

Ancient Near East

Sophie Dmare-Lafont (Paris) 23 Zero and Infinity: the Archives

in Mesopotamia

Klaas R. Veenhof (Leiden) 27 The Archives of Old Assyrian Traders:

their Nature, Functions and Use

Antoine Jacquet (Paris) 63 Family Archives in Mesopotamia

during the Old Babylonian Period

Susanne Paulus (Mnster) 87 The Limits of Middle Babylonian

Archives

Classical Greece

Christophe Pbarthe (Bordeaux) 107 Les archives de la cit de raison.

Dmocratie athnienne et pratiques documentaires lpoque classique

Shimon Epstein (Tel-Aviv /Freiburg) 127 Attic Building Accounts from

Euthynae to Stelae

Edward M. Harris (Durham) 143 The Plaint in Athenian Law

and Legal Procedure

Michele Faraguna (Trieste) 163 Archives in Classical Greece:

Some Observations

The Persian Tradition and the Hellenistic World

Ingo Kottsieper (Gttingen) 175 Aramische Archive aus

achmenidischer Zeit und ihre Funktion

5 Laura Boffo (Trieste) 201 La presenza dei re negli archivi

delle poleis ellenistiche

Lucia Criscuolo (Bologna) 245 Copie, malacopie, copie d'ufficio

e il problema della titolarit di un archivio nellEgitto tolemaico

Mark Depauw (Leuven) 259 Reflections on Reconstructing

Private and Official Archives

The Roman Empire

va Jakab (Szeged) 269 Introduction: Archives in the Roman

Empire

Kaja Harter-Uibopuu (Wien) 273 Epigraphische Quellen zum

Archivwesen in den griechischen Poleis des ausgehenden Hellenismus und der Kaiserzeit

Thomas Kruse (Wien) 307 Bevlkerungskontrolle,

Statuszugang und Archivpraxis im rmischen gypten

Rudolf Haensch (Mnchen) 333 Die Statthalterarchive

der Sptantike

Uri Yiftach-Firanko (Jerusalem) 351 Conclusions

363 Index locorum

7foreword

Foreword

To Lisetta Brunner

The research group Legal Documents in Ancient Societies aims to investigate the legal and administrative systems in a variety of societies of the ancient world through a document-based approach, crossing traditional disciplinary bounda-ries and providing a locus for scholars who work in different but contiguous fields to discuss and compare the results of their individual research. The fourth meeting of the group was held at the University of Trieste on 30 September-1

October 2011 and focused on the study of archives and archival records and the different ways they interlocked with, and were functional to, the workings of the ancient administrative, and political, systems.

Twelve papers were delivered at the meeting and are published in this book in a revised form. The papers are arranged in four sections dealing respectively with the Ancient Near East, Classical Greece, the Persian Tradition and the Hel-lenistic World, and the Roman Empire. Given that the themes touched upon by the contributors chronologically span from the astoundingly extensive records of the Old Assyrian traders in the early second millennium B.C. to the archives kept by provincial governors in the late Roman Empire and range geographi-cally from Mesopotamia to the Western Mediterranean, including Asia Minor, Egypt and Aegean Greece, considerable effort has been made, first, to contextu-alise the significance of each essay within the scholarly debate of each discipline and, secondly, to bridge the gaps and highlight similarities and differences in the

8archival practices and concepts of the societies examined. Each section is thus enriched by introductory comments or afterthoughts on the three papers, while the Introduction and Conclusions tie up the common threads and bring together the general methodological and conceptual concerns emerging from the case-studies analysed in the essays.

In order to avoid modern anachronistic projections on ancient documenta-tion, the working definition underlying the essays has been that an archive in line with the Encyclopaedia Britannica is the organised body of records produced or received by a public, or private, entity in the transaction of affairs and pre-served by it for its specific needs and purposes. In other words, archives, whether public or private, are no doubt the physical spaces, the repositories where records are kept, but they are also the organised active memory of the society produc-ing them, thus reflecting the practical needs and administrative practices as well as the ideological models of that society, whose world order they mirror and perpetuate to a significant extent. In the essays by I. Kottsieper and L. Criscuolo archives, conceived as collections of documents deliberately made for public or private purposes in antiquity, have been set apart from dossiers, assemblages of texts not originally kept in the same repository but successively brought to-gether as a result of different circumstances. Only the former, archives in the technical sense, are hence studied in this volume.

The archives dealt with in the essays are especially conspicuous for their va-riety, both in terms of quality and of quantity. The first element distinguishing them is whether they were of public or private nature, although such distinction is not always necessarily clear-cut and, as shown by K. Veenhof and A. Jacquet, it can hardly be applied to the Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian source material. Records were, moreover, written on a variety of materials, including clay tablets, papyrus, wooden tablets, but also on leather as well as bronze and lead plates, so that when they were kept on perishable materials and are now lost, as is normal-ly the case for the Graeco-Roman world, their existence must be inferred from literary texts and epigraphic documents, which were copies of (or extracts from) archival records and, as shown by K. Harter-Uibopuu, sometimes established regulations regarding their upkeep and organisation.

Other variables concern the life-time of archives and records. Documents were generally preserved and stored not for the sake of keeping a memory of the past but for their concrete significance for the present. At the public level, as illustrated by Th. Kruse, written texts testifying to the privileged legal and fiscal status of individuals in Roman Egypt could be consulted and quoted even 200 years later, while boundary disputes between Greek poleis in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor and the official correspondence between Greek cities and Hellenistic kings, once more often concerning the renewal of tax privileges, not rarely reveal, as highlighted by L. Boffo, that the relevant documents could be produced decades, if not centuries after the original settlement or award. Like-wise, following E.M. Harris argument, written plaints in Classical Athens played

9foreword

an important role in enforcing the principle of res iudicata, whereas the archivi-zation of official manumission documents in Hellenistic and Roman Delphi was meant to provide permanent evidence of free status. Other detailed documents, as emphasized by S. Epstein in his contribution on Athenian fifth and fourth century building accounts, were, on the other hand, discarded when they were no longer of use and only shortened, recapitulative records were likely to have a longer life. At a private level, K. Veenhof, A. Jacquet and I. Kottsieper make a simi-lar distinction between documents of unlimited and those of limited validity. Documents proving title of ownership, donations or inheritance rights were, as a rule, preserved for a long time, for several generations, while short-term con-tracts were generally discarded as soon as the obligation had been fulfilled. The keeping of loan contracts in an Old Babylonian archive beyond the expiry date can, as a consequence, be explained by assuming that the debts had not been paid and, in actual fact, remained outstanding.

Notwithstanding such variety of individual cases, a number of common pat-terns also emerge in respect to the organization and the physical aspect of the storerooms where the documents were preserved, the classification of texts, the function of record-keeping and the role of seals. One further constant pattern is that archives, especially public ones, were rarely centralised and official informa-tion was stored in multiple repositories kept by different magistrates interacting with one another. This is the case, at a private level, with the archives of the Old Assyrian traders and, at a public level, with the local archives of Classical Athens and Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Such a pattern furthermore entails, as shown by L. Criscuolo, that documents often had to be available in more than one copy.

Leaving aside the complex and intractable question of whether these shared habits were the result of independent developments or represent a common trait to the entire Near Eastern and Mediterranean area, which far exceeds the scope of this volume, we are entitled to speak of a recurring archival behaviour. It appears that in the best documented areas and periods, such as Mesopotamia in the second millennium B.C. and in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, the produc-tion of written records was impressively abundant and administrative and le-gal practices had reached a remarkable degree of complexity and sophistication. Each individual administrative act entailed the drawing of multiple documents and thus produced a true documentary chain. On this basis, it seems reasonable to assume that also where archival documents, with some important exceptions, have not been preserved but where sophisticated uses of writing were developed, as is the case of the Greek world, the functioning of the political, institutional, le-gal and economic system was largely dependant on the plentiful production of written documents and on extensive record-keeping.

This book would not have seen the light without the help and support of many. I would like to acknowledge my sincere gratitude to Professor Roger S. Bagnall and to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University for their generous financial contribution towards the organization of the meet-

10

ing in Trieste. Warmest thanks are also due to the Dipartimento di Storia e Cul-ture dallAntichit al Mondo Contemporaneo (now renamed as Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici) of the University of Trieste and to its Head Professor Claudio Zaccaria for providing further substantial funding. I am grateful for her help and collaboration before and after the meeting to my colleague Professor Laura Boffo with whom I share a long-term project on Public archives in the Greek cities from the archaic to the early Roman age. This volume was funded by the Ital-ian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research (MIUR) as a part of that pro-ject (PRIN 2008 La burocrazia greca: definizione e funzionamento dei procedimenti amministrativi nel mondo antico; Coordinatore nazionale: Prof. Lucia Criscuolo). I would also like to thank the participants for the stimulating discussion at the meeting and for the speedy revision of the texts for publication. The members of the steering committee of the group Legal Documents in Ancient Societies, Sophie Dmare-Lafont, Mark Depauw, va Jakab, Dennis P. Kehoe, Uri Yiftach-Firanko, provided vital assistance with scientific and practical advice and with their re-sponses to the papers at the end of each session. Special thanks are moreover due to Dr. Mauro Rossi and Mrs. Gabriella Clabot at EUT for their competent and efficient handling of the production of the book. I would like to finally thank my dear wife Joanna and my family for their moral and emotional support over the years.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Lisetta Brunner, without whom I would have never been what I am.

Michele Faraguna

Trieste, February 2013

11archives and archival documents

The importance of archives, whether they consist of documents written on in-scriptions, papyri, or cuneiform tablets, can hardly be overstated for the study of many questions in ancient history, including, among other things, law, espe-cially as it affected family relationships, the ancient economy, and the adminis-tration of empires. The study of archives has long been a basic feature of ancient history, but in recent years, scholars have approached archives employing new methodologies adapted from other fields, particularly in the social sciences. This is certainly so in papyrology, the field represented in this volume with which I am most familiar, but it is also the case with epigraphy and cuneiform studies. This increasingly sophisticated use of archival material helps us to ask new ques-tions in many fields in ancient history, and the sharing of methodologies across disciplines makes it possible for scholars in diverse fields to learn from one an-other, even though they often have little regular contact because of the special-ized nature of their work. This was certainly the case at the Legal Documents in Ancient Societies meeting in which I participated, the conference in Washing-ton in 2009 on transaction costs in ancient economies, which brought together Egyptologists, legal scholars, and ancient historians. The papers at the conference in Trieste now collected in this volume remind all of us how much scholars can learn from colleagues working in very different disciplines. In what follows, I would like to sketch out what I understand to be some important developments

Archives and Archival Documents in Ancient Societies: Introduction

dennis kehoe

12

in the use of archival material, and then, on that basis, to try to place the papers collected in the present volume in a broader perspective.

To begin with papyrology, collections of documents, perhaps, on occasion, in-accurately termed archives, have provided a basis for investigating many issues, from administrative and economic history in Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt, to private family law and legal history. In the field of economic history, the Zenon papyri, the Heroninos archive, and the Apion papyri represent the most important sources of evidence for analyzing the development of estates and the political economy of Egypt in the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. However, our understanding of the rural economy has been enhanced by other less heralded archives. Two important examples are the Soterichos archive (OMAR 1979), which documents the affairs of a small-scale tenant farmer in the Fayum in the late first century CE, and the archive of Aurelius Isidorus (BOAK & YOUTIE 1960), which allows us to trace the challenges affecting landowners and liturgists in Karanis in the Fayum at the turn of the fourth century CE.

The chief advantage of private papyrological archives like these for studying the rural economy of Greco-Roman Egypt is that they allow us to trace in detail the individual situations of farmers, both tenants and landowners, particularly in terms of their relationships with landlords, laborers, and other landowners, as well as the state. Since archival material by its very nature concerns the affairs of discrete individuals, we cannot automatically generalize from patterns revealed in them. However, what we can do is trace basic economic relationships, which can add depth to or alter more overarching models of the ancient economy. The study of archives is especially valuable when their evidence can be placed in a broader historical context, one that is properly based on models developed from other ancient evidence and from comparative material from better documented pre-industrial economies. At the very least, comparative evidence allows us to appreciate what kind of economic relationships were likely to have occurred in antiquity, what levels of production might be feasible in an ancient economy, and how later societies confronted similar legal issues resulting from economic activity and familial relationships.

We can see how our understanding of economic relationships can be changed by archival material by considering the Heroninos archive, a collection of some 450 letters, orders, and accounts that document in great detail the management of a large estate in third-century CE Roman Egypt. Dominic Rathbone, in his ground-breaking 1991 book, undertakes a detailed investigation of this material. Rathbones study traces to the degree possible the development of large estates belonging to Aurelius Appianus, an equestrian and councilor at Alexandria, thus a member of Egypts provincial elite, and other persons of his circle. But more im-portant, the Heroninos archive allows us to trace the management of an estate to a degree of detail unparalleled elsewhere in the Roman Empire. Rathbones study shows that at least some landowners employed wage labor on a scale not hereto-fore recognized, and it also provides evidence for how such workers were deployed


and paid. In addition, the detailed accounts that Heroninos and other administra-tors submitted to the estates central administration suggest that the owners of this and comparable estates could calculate the profitability of the various crops they cultivated. However, when interpreted against a broader model of an agrar-ian economy with little annual growth and limited opportunities for investing large amounts of wealth, the evidence from the Heroninos archive provides ev-idence for how a landowner sought to profit under such constraints by, among other things, developing a rigorous management system to control the costs of producing basic staples such as wine and wheat, and thereby gaining economies of scale that gave them competitive advantages over smaller-scale farmers.

Since Rathbones work on the Heroninos archive, a number of scholars have engaged in the intensive study of a comparable body of material from late antiquity, the documentary papyri concerned with the organization and manage-ment of the estates of the Flavii Apions in sixth-century Oxyrhynchus. Although the material connected with the Apions does not constitute a coherent archive in the way that many contributors to the present volume would define one, the fifth-century and sixth-century papyri do provide a coherent body of material that allows us to study in some detail the organization of a large estate belonging to a member of the Byzantine imperial aristocracy. We can also trace both how this estate grew over time and how its growth affected the agrarian economy in the surrounding Oxyrhynchite villages. Among the scholars who have studied this material in recent years are Jairus Banaji (2001), who has traced how aris-tocratic landowners took advantage of their role in tax collection to accumulate wealth, Roberta Mazza (2001), Peter Sarris (2006), and Todd Hickey (2012).

The numerous papyri associated with the estate of the Apions make it pos-sible to study not only the organization and management of the estate, but also the estates relationship with the surrounding agricultural communities, the vil-lages in the Oxyrhynchite nome in which the Apions owned property. This is a subject that Giovanni Ruffini (2008) has taken up in his recent book, a work that suggests the possibilities of examining now familiar documentary material from a new theoretical perspective. In his study, Ruffini seeks to come to a bet-ter understanding of the economic and social role that the Apion estate played in the Oxyrhynchite nome, and on that basis to draw broader conclusions about the role of large estates in the Byzantine Empire. He does this by drawing on an emerging field in the social sciences, social network theory, to map the connec-tions and relationships among individual persons associated with the Apion es-tate. This material allows Ruffini to test the hypothesis that the estate stood at the top of a centralized hierarchy in Oxyrhynchus, which would mean that the estate occupied a dominating position in the region. In an alternative model, as-sociated with the Egyptian village of Aphrodito, contemporary with sixth-centu-ry Oxyrhynchus, which Ruffini also examines, small farmers and tenants seem to have established relationships directly among themselves, without having a large estate or an economically dominant house serve as the point of contact.

14

Ruffini is one of several young scholars to use network theory to make sense of a vast array of data in order to ask new questions about an ancient society. Another scholar using this methodology is Caroline Waerzeggers (Leiden), who has applied social network analysis to neo-Babylonian cuneiform archives so as to map the relationships among elite in Babylon (Waerzeggers, forthcoming). In a very different field, my own colleague at Tulane University Margaret Butler is applying social network theory to an archaeological data base of burials from Macedon and other locations in ancient Greece. Butler uses changes in burial customs as proxy evidence for changing social institutions in fourth-century Macedon, and network theory allows her to determine how certain artifacts found in graves might cluster.1 Testing the strength of links between various bur-ial practices enables Butler to trace changing burial customs in a rigorous rather than largely impressionistic fashion. It is interesting to see that a similar meth-odology can be applied both to interpreting material culture and to documentary evidence. To return to Caroline Waerzeggers, she presented a paper on network theory at a conference in 2008 organized by Michael Jursa of Vienna as part of his project on the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC.2 For this conference Jursa sought out scholars working on various periods in Babylo-nian history as well as ones working in the Hellenistic and Roman economies. The Babylonian scholars, in my understanding, are confronted with masses of documents in numerous cuneiform archives, and so Jursa sought to establish a scholarly dialogue with Greek and Roman historians to offer both sides a broader perspective as they pursue their individual topics. The scholars presenting pa-pers on the Babylonian world at the Vienna conference demonstrated a great deal of ingenuity in applying new methodologies to their evidence and in drawing compelling conclusions about the nature of ancient Near Eastern economies.

The papers in this volume approach archives from a somewhat different per-spective, with a focus on understanding them as coherent bodies of evidence and on that basis drawing historical conclusions, for example, about the governmen-tal policies in ancient city states or empires, about economic relationships in the ancient Near East, or about the role of law in the administration of justice.

Several of the papers are concerned directly with establishing criteria for de-fining an archive and on this basis interpreting one. Thus Klaas Veenhof, The Archives of Old Assyrian Traders: their Nature, Functions and Use, examines a collection of some 23,000 clay tablets kept by Old Assyrian traders in the city of Kanesh in southern Anatolia from about 1900 BCE until the city was destroyed in 1835 BCE. Many of the traders kept archives of documents in their houses in Kanesh, and they apparently had advance warning about the impending doom

1 In a book project titled The Kings Canvas: The Transformation of Ancient Macedon.

2 The conference Too much data? Generalizations and model-building in ancient economic history on the basis of large corpora of documentary evidence was held July 16-17, 2008 at the University of Vienna.


of their city, since they were able to take some documents, presumably ones concerning still outstanding obligations, with them when they abandoned their houses. The surviving archives are thus far from complete, but they do offer a great deal of information about the economic activities of merchants engaging in commerce far from the capital of the empire, in one of as many as forty trading stations in Anatolia. These archives seem to offer a great deal of evidence for how such merchants were able to enforce obligations and resolve disputes, which would have been absolutely vital to their being able to conduct business. Of par-ticular interest is the governing body that loomed over the traders, the karum, a hierarchical organization that served to regulate relationships among traders. Did it also play a role in enforcing contracts into which the Assyrian traders en-tered with local people from whom they acquired gold and silver? The paper of Antoine Jacquet, Family Archives in Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian Period, is part of a broad project to consider archives from the first dynasty of Bablyon, in the 20th to the 17th centuries BCE, in their context as they are discov-ered archaeologically, to learn what one can from the ensemble of documents rather than from documents considered individually. Jacquets paper describes the variety of people who kept archives, including many women. One of his im-portant points is that one should distinguish between documents kept for the long term, often concerned with real estate sales, juridical decisions, marriage, inheritance, adoptions, and manumissions, and documents recording short-term obligations, such as debt contracts, which would be destroyed when the obligation was completed or at least be eventually purged. Short-term arrange-ments, which might offer an insight into the scale of commerce in which traders would be involved, are likely to be under-represented in the archives. Moreover, both Veenhof and Jacquet raise the troubling point that it is difficult to see how ancient people navigated among their archives to retrieve important informa-tion in a timely fashion.

To turn to papyri and Ptolemaic Egypt, Lucia Criscuolo, Copie, malacopie, copie dufficio e il problema della titolarit di un archivio nellEgitto tolemaico, distinguishes between archives proper, that is, collections of documents delib-erately collected and maintained and kept by an individual for a specific pur-pose, and other dossiers of documents, sometimes assembled in antiquity, but without the direct purpose of an archive. In her paper, Criscuolo emphasizes the importance of understanding the conditions under which documents were pro-duced, especially copies of official documents, which may not display a profes-sional appearance. Clearly the phenomenon of copying documents produced for official purposes was widespread, since it could be important for an individual to be able to have available the information from official enactments. From another perspective, in his paper on Aramaic archives from the Persian period in Egypt, Ingo Kottsieper explores the reasons why individuals maintained archives. In the case of Nakhth or, an official of the Persian satrap Arsames, the preserved pa-pers concern Nakhthors duties and those of his predecessor, and their collection

16

of documents served to establish Nakhth ors political authority. Other archives that Kottsieper examines might serve to establish peoples personal legal status or rights, as is the case with the archives of Jedaniah and Anani.

To return to the ancient Near East, Susanne Paulus, The Limits of Middle Babylonian Archives, examines archival material concerning the Kassite dy-nasty to reconstruct landownership patterns, important both for the economic history of the period and for understanding the power of the king, which to a large extent derived from his capacity to bestow land on loyal or favored subjects. The archival material, however, does not permit drawing a complete picture of changes in landownership, and many documents remain unpublished. Howev-er, Paulus finds a promising way forward by examining stone inscriptions, or ku-durrus. These stones, which invoked divine protection against anyone who might disturb the rights of the temple or individual who erected them, included texts recording land donations. So they help to fill in gaps in the incomplete archival material. For example, the king, as the highest judge, would adjudicate property disputes, but there is no royal archive documenting such decisions, since it fell to the individuals involved in the dispute to preserve their documents. The ku-durrus provide an important source of information to reconstruct the economic history of this period.

Preserving documents in public archives was a common activity for Greek city states, and Christophe Pbarthe, Les archives de la cit de raison: dmocratie athnienne et pratiques documentaires lpoque classique, examines the role of local and centrally maintained written records and the relationship between them to address the broader issues about the nature of Athenian democracy. One issue concerns the degree to which rationality rather than traditional social ties characterized the organization of Greek city states. In addition, Pbarthes study raises questions concerning the degree to which writing (as opposed to orality) was central to classical Greek democracy. If, as Pbarthe argues, the use of writ-ing was an integral part of a broadly rational organization of the city state, it is still not always clear precisely what purpose the publication of a document on stone served, or the relationship between an inscription that could be publicly viewed and the original documents maintained by the city. Shimon Epstein ad-dresses this issue in his paper, Attic Building Accounts from Euthynae to Stelae, concerned with the inscriptions recording the public building accounts from the Periclean building program in fifth-century BCE Athens, the later construction of the Erechtheion, and fourth-century building accounts from Eleusis. By ana-lyzing the information that was in all likelihood presented when the officials in charge of these building programs underwent their auditing process, but did not appear on the inscriptions, Epstein makes a convincing argument about the po-litical purposes of the inscriptions. For Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Laura Boffo, La presenza dei re negli archivi delle poleis ellenistiche, and Kaja Harter-Uibopuu, Epigraphische Quellen zum Archivwesen in den griechischen Poleis des ausgehenden Hellenismus und der Kaiserzeit, investi-


gate the preservation of documents concerned with both the administration of the cities and with private legal arrangements. Boffo examines the epigraphic archives kept by cities as a way of understanding the evolving relationship be-tween city and king in the Hellenistic world. Her thesis is that the preservation of archives involving royal enactments was a sign of the kings power. The kings exercised their power not only through imposing taxes on the cities and reward-ing favored individuals with honors, but also through acts of generosity toward a city, such as funding cults or even the education of children.

Harter-Uibopuu considers the well-known manumission documents from Delphi as well as grave regulations from Roman Asia Minor to address how cit-ies changed their practices in preserving documents from Hellenistic times. This paper raises important questions for how people in Roman provinces sought to enforce private legal arrangements. Arranging the manumission of a slave as a sale to the god at Delphi carried with it a kind of protection that the owners of the slaves involved apparently did not expect to gain from the more conventional le-gal institutions of their cities. The publication on the temple wall, in abbreviated form, of the manumission document preserved in the archive was surely meant to emphasize both the validity of the manumissions and the authority of the god in enforcing them. In Asia Minor, by contrast, the grave regulations show that private individuals were confident of being able to call upon public authorities to enforce their wishes about the ways in which their tombs would be used over generations long after they were deceased. The prescription that a violator of the tomb would be compelled to pay a public fine is paralleled in Greek wills from Roman Egypt, in which the testators also include public fines for people who vio-late the terms of the will.

Archives could play a much more basic role in resolving legal disputes, as em-phasized by Edward Harris paper on the The Plaint in Athenian Law and Legal Procedure. Harris challenges the widely held belief that decisions in Athenian courts were reached more by rhetoric or social considerations than by following the strict requirements of the law. Roman civil procedure tried to limit the scope for going outside of the strict requirements of the law through the formulary sys-tem. Athenian law did this by requiring public and private actions to be drawn up specifically in accordance with existing statutes (Roman law did not require this, but instead required a remedy to exist), and the plaint carefully outlined the statute violated, the precise nature of the violations of the laws, and the amount of damages caused and sought. Harris focus on the plaint as a feature of Athenian law that brought order and predictability to the adjudication of disputes raises some broader questions. One is whether other Greek city states applied a simi-lar requirement to court cases, or whether the Athenian court system applied a unique reform that made legal business qualitatively different from other Greek cities. A more fundamental issue concerns the difference between ways in which Greek law developed in the classical period, closely tied as it was with the legisla-tion and thus the political processes of Greek democracy. In contemporary Rome,

18

by contrast, as Aldo Schiavone (2012) emphasizes, the development and interpre-tation of Roman law remained largely in the hands of aristocratic legal experts, who struggled to remain independent from immediate political pressures. To re-turn to Athenian law, a further incentive for trials to be conducted in accordance with the law consisted in the penalties that might be imposed on magistrates who allowed cases in violation of these prescriptions. That the administration of Athenian law, then, might be more predictable than other scholars, most nota-bly Adriann Lanni (2006), would suggest, has important implications for under-standing the Athenian economy in the fourth century, a period for which we also have substantial evidence for the development of commercial banking.

Publicly maintained archives could play a crucial role in deciding legal issues that had wider implications for the administration of cities, as Thomas Kruse emphasizes in his paper Bevlkerungskontrolle, Statuszugang und Archiv-praxis im rmischen gypten. If Roman rule in Egypt to a large extent involved defining the population in terms of various legal statuses with corresponding privileges, it could be crucial both for the state and private individuals to have access to records that could prove status. In many areas of classical Roman law, it was not necessary to have written documentation to prove a case or enforce a contract, although written evidence would obviously be helpful. In the case of marriage, for example, the absence of documentation was not a hindrance to as-serting that a marriage was legitimate, as the emperor Probus, in a constitution preserved in the Code of Justinian, responded in a third-century rescript, as long as there were witness who could verify that a marriage existed (C. 5.4.9). In the later empire, a series of constitutions by the emperor Justinian makes clear a growing preference for written documentation. In Roman Egypt, proof of status was greatly facilitated by the ability of cities to maintain public archives with epikrisis documents and other indications of status, such as the house-by-house census declarations. Rudolf Haensch offers a very different perspective in his paper on the types of archives kept by provincial governors in the later Roman Empire, Die Statthalterarchive der Sptantike. Haensch takes the view that, in the earlier empire, when it is generally assumed that provincial governors main-tained extensive archives, the types of documentation to which governors could have recourse were limited. But the situation changed in late antiquity, as gover-nors maintained for decades court protocols and other important records. These might be available in the provincial capital, as well as in a central store of archives in Constantinople. The best evidence for the long duration of extensive archives is the ability of Augustine to quote decisions made in the early fourth century when he discusses the relations between Catholics and Donatists. Haenschs in-vestigation has important implications for the administration of justice both un-der the principate and in late antiquity; an important question concerns whether the administration of justice in the Roman Empire was enhanced by the access on the part of provincial governors and other judges to relevant legal decisions,


or whether it was largely incumbent upon the litigants to produce the relevant documentation to support their cases.

To conclude, the papers in this volume use comparable methodologies to ad-dress common questions in the field of ancient history writ large. The focus on the exact nature of archival material and the uses to which it might be put pro-vide new perspectives to make more precise the types of conclusions that can be drawn in future work on this type of evidence. The papers in this volume point the way to new ways in which archives from the ancient world can be studied, as well as to the benefits of bringing together scholars working in diverse fields with common interests and methodologies.

20

Bibliography Banaji 2001 J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance, Oxford.

Boak & Youtie 1960 A. E. R. Boak & H. C. Youtie, The Archive of Aurelius Isidorus in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and the University of Michigan (P. Cair. Isidor.), Ann Arbor.

Hickey 2012 T. M. Hickey, Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt, Ann Arbor.

Lanni 2006 A. Lanni, Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens, Cambridge.

Mazza 2001 R. Mazza, LArchivio degli Apioni. Terra, lavoro e propriet senatoria nellEgitto tardoantico. Bari.

Omar 1979 S. Omar, Das Archiv des Soterichos, Pap.Colon. VIII, Opladen.

Rathbone 1991 D. Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-Century A.D. Egypt: the Heroninos Archive and the Appianus Estate, Cambridge.

Ruffini 2008 G. Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt, Cambridge.

Sarris 2006 P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, Cambridge.

Schiavone 2012 A. Schiavone, The Invention of Law in the West, trans. Jeremy Carden and Antony Shugaar, Cambridge (Mass.) and London.

Waerzeggers, forthcoming C. Waerzeggers, Marduk-rmanni. Local Networks and Imperial Politics in Achaemenid Babylonia, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, Leuven.

Ancient Near East

23archives in the ancient near east: response

Glory (or shame) to the brick ! wrote Prof. G. Cardascia in an article introduc-ing legal assyriology to beginners1. Indeed, Assyriologists are better off with the numerous tablets found in the deserts of the Near East, but this documentary wealth is not fully available nor completely usable, for many reasons.

One of them is the dispersion of the archives2.By itself, a tablet gives a great amount of information, deriving from its con-

tent but also from its external aspect, the shape of its writing and the mention or the printing of seal(s). But a complete interpretation also requires knowledge of the archaeological context of its origin, and its possible connection to an archive.

Whether this tablet was kept with others or not, how it was stored, in which room or part of a building, all this enhances and enlightens the historical comment. What to do for instance with a list of people receiving various amounts of grain or silver? A. Jacquet shows here how the archivistic point of view helps to rule out some hypotheses and suggest others. Such an approach implies

1 Cardascia 1954 = 1995, 15: Gloire (ou opprobre) la brique !.

2 On the notion of archive in Mesopotamia, and the scientific and methodological questions it raises, see Veenhof 1986, and especially his brillant introduction to the volume (1-36).

Zero and Infinity:the Archives in Mesopotamia

sophie dmare-lafont

24

awareness of the Mesopotamian practices of conservation and utilization of the archives.

The administrative services of palaces or temples on the one hand and those of the large households owning huge estates on the other hand worked in the same manner, though on a different scale: incomes and expenses were registered on notes, which were regularly copied on monthly or annual tablets; distribu-tions of rations to employees and members of the family were carefully listed; some legal documents were kept, as well as letters dealing with political or ad-ministrative matters, or with current litigations in court.

Taken on their own, these texts may look very disparate and the link between them does not appear at first sight. For instance, we know that royal or religious officers in Babylonia3 or in Syria4 used to put together at home documents con-cerning their official functions along with their own family archives or those belonging to other citizens. Had we ignored their common provenience, the idea of bringing these texts together would have not occurred to us. Taking into con-sideration their material unity changes the way we look at the criteria of classifi-cation and internal organization of an archive, and leads us also to reconsider the relevance or the distinction between official and private sectors.

These pieces of information, which we consider crucial nowadays, were ig-nored or neglected for a long time. In the middle of the 19th century, during the relentless competition between European cultural diplomacies in the Near East, the excavators usually diplomats themselves were basically concerned with the quantity of findings: they wanted to send to their museums as many artifacts and texts as possible, even if this meant damaging the sites, scattering the ar-chives and destroying small pieces considered ordinary or uninteresting. Many precious indications have been lost during the harsh diggings of the archaeologi-cal pioneers. For instance, no one would pay attention to the sherds sometimes found along with the tablets because they were seen as common fragments of pottery; but they could have been the remains of storage jars, and could have given information about the archival methods of the Mesopotamians5. In the same vein, the precise locus where the texts were found and their disposition on the ground were sometimes omitted, when in fact these data inform us about the classification practices and the activities of a building. Finally, the political circumstances, the increasing number of illicit diggings and the setting up of the museum collections have often led to the dispersion of archives which origi-nally formed a coherent set. The case of the family of Ea-ilta-bni, in the 7th-6th

3 See for instance the texts from Dr-Abieuh, published by Van Lerberghe & Voet 2009, and the comments of D. Charpin, Annuaire de lEcole Pratique des Hautes Etudes 142, 2011, 17-21, esp. 21.

4 See the archives of the diviner Z-Bala and his family at Emar (Dmare-Lafont 2008, 213-14) and the archives from the house of Urtenu at Ugarit (Bordreuil & Malbran-Labat 1995).

5 Veenhof 1986, 13.

25archives in the ancient near east: response

centuries B.C., is a good example thereof: their activities are reported during six generations in tablets kept in Jena, Istanbul, Oxford, Paris and at Yale University. A patient work aiming at regrouping the whole file was necessary in order to al-low a global study of the matrimonial and economic strategies of this powerful family from Borsippa (modern Birs Nimrud, close to Babylon)6.

Mesopotamian families themselves sometimes had to face the scattering of their own archives, because of marriages, commercial activities or uprootings after wars or economic crises. The Assyrian merchants, for instance, often had two homes and carried their archives from one house to the other, as K. Veenhof explains here. In Old-Babylonian times, exiled people from Uruk, in Southern Mesopotamia, moved to the North and settled in Kish, bringing with them their documents7.

Finally, it sometimes happened that the tablets were destroyed, when they preluded to the drafting of official and monumental documents. Such is the case of the Medio-Babylonian kudurrus studied by S. Paulus in this volume: paradoxi-cally, they testify to the existence of these invisible documents and raise the question of the purpose of such inscriptions engraved in the stone.

Be they available or virtual, archives are the frame within which most of the Mesopotamian sources have to be interpreted and, in this respect, the three fol-lowing contributions illustrate several aspects among the numerous avenues to be further explored.

6 Joanns 1989.

7 Charpin 1986, 402-18.

26

Bibliography Bordreuil & Malbran-Labat 1995 P. Bordreuil & Fl. Malbran-Labat, Les archives de la maison dOurtenou, CRAI 139/2, 443-51.

Cardascia 1954 G. Cardascia, Splendeur et misre de lassyriologie juridique, Annales Universitatis Saraviensis 3, 156-62 (reprinted in Hommage Guillaume Cardascia, Mditerranes 3, 1995, 15-23).

Charpin 1986 D. Charpin, Le clerg dUr au sicle dHammurabi (XIXe-XVIIIe sicles av. J.-C.), Hautes Etudes Orientales 22, Paris.

Dmare-Lafont 2008 S. Dmare-Lafont, The King and the Diviner at Emar, in L. dAlfonso, Y. Cohen & D. Srenhagen (eds.), The City of Emar among the Late Bronze Age Empires History, Landscape and Society, Proceedings of the Konstanz Emar Conference 25-26.04.2006, AOAT 349, Mnster, 207-17.

Joanns 1989 F. Joanns, Archives de Borsippa: la famille Ea-ilta-bni. Etude dun lot darchives familiales en Babylonie du VIIIe au Ve sicle av. J.-C., Hautes Etudes Orientales 25, Paris-Genve.

Van Lerberghe & Voet 2009 K. Van Lerberghe & G. Voet, A Late Old Baylonian Temple Archive from Dr-Abieu, CUSAS 8, Bethesda.

Veenhof 1986 K.R. Veenhof (ed.), Cuneiform Archives and Libraries. Papers read at the XXXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden 1983, PIHANS 57, Leyde.

27the archives of old assyrian traders

klaas r. veenhof

The Archives of Old Assyrian Traders: their Nature, Functions and Use1

The Old Assyrian archives are private archives. They were found in the houses of traders who in the early centuries of the second millennium BC lived in Kanesh, an ancient city in Central Anatolia, not far from modern Kayseri. The houses are situated in the commercial district of the lower town, called krum Kanesh, which flourished for more than a century during the period of level II, which came to an end by destruction around 1835 BC (middle chronology). The Assyrian settle-ment in Kanesh is not only nearly the only source of our documentation, thanks to more than fifty years of excavations, it was also the administrative capital of an Assyrian colonial network that comprised ca. 30 commercial settlements and small trading stations, spread over the whole of Central Anatolia. The archives were kept in what they called the sealed room (maknukum) or guarded room (maartum), where also valuables were stored. They vary considerably in size and range from few hundred to a few times ca. 2000 cuneiform documents, varia-tions that must reflect the importance and status of a trader, the history of the

1 See for general information on the excavation at Kanesh and on the Old Assyrian trade Larsen 1976; zg 2003, and Veenhof 2008a, mentioned below in the bibliography, and see also C. Michel, Old Assyrian Bibliography (OAAS 1), Leiden 2003. In the following text I have simplified the rendering of the Assyrian names, not indicating long vowels and typical Semitic consonants, writing Ishtar instead of Itar, Assur, etc.

28

house and presumably also the administrative habits of the owner. The archives consist of the written documents accumulated drawn up, received, acquired, accepted for safe-keeping, or deposited there for other reasons during the pe-riod of activity of a trader, which usually covered many, occasionally up to thirty years. In several cases the house had been taken over or inherited by his son, who added his own records to those left behind by his father and there are also a few examples of archives with records of three generations of traders. The archives brought to light by the excavations, first by the villagers and after 1948 by Turk-ish archeologists, reflect what they contained when the houses were destroyed.

1. Traders, archives and records

Some general information on the traders, their archives and the types of records they contain is necessary before I can focus on the subject of this paper. This is not easy, because the archives of Kanesh have yielded more than 23.000 cunei-form documents (half of which are more or less known or accessible) of an at times bewildering variety, which reflect an extensive and very sophisticated overland trade, carried out by perhaps ca. 60 trading families. Moreover, most of the texts available were unearthed and sold by the local villagers, so that their archival background and coherence is unclear. Only the publication of officially excavated archives, in TPAK 1 and the volumes of the series AKT, offers better in-sights, but much work still remains to be done.

Status, wealth and family situation of the traders vary considerably and their archives, all of which contain the usual variety of business documents, reflect these differences in the nature and numbers of commercial records and corre-spondence and to some extent also in the presence of certain types of legal docu-ments. And most traders also had a family house in Assur, with an archive, but we know little from Assur, because the layers of this period in the lower town were not reached by the German excavators.

In general, archives of traders whose family had stayed behind in Assur con-tain more letters of their wives and more correspondence with relatives, busi-ness associates and representatives, who took care of their legal and economic interests in Assur. Archives of traders living in Assur, whose grown-up sons lived and worked in Anatolia, include letters exchanged between them, while those of traders settled in Kanesh with their family comprise letters exchanged with their wives when they were traveling around. Important family documents marriage contracts, testaments, title deeds, last wills, and joint-stock contracts that supplied the trader with his capital were usually kept in the archive in As-sur, but may turn up in Kanesh when a whole family lived there. Many of the older traders focused on the import of tin and textiles from Assur and their sale for silver and gold in Anatolia, so that their archives contain many letters and records relating to the caravan trade. Others were more involved in the internal


trade in copper and wool inside Anatolia, and we also meet traders who traveled a lot in Anatolia and were engaged in commission sale and agency for colleagues in Assur and Kanesh.

For a good appraisal of the archives several facts have to be taken into account. The first is that several traders also had houses apparently with archives in other trading settlements in Anatolia, where they stayed temporarily and even could move. This can only be discovered by a comprehensive analysis of an ar-chive and as an example I mention some features of the large archive of Shallim-Assur and his family (more than 1100 texts), which has been analyzed in an ex-emplary way by Larsen. In the first volume of its edition (AKT 6a) he writes: It seems clear that his main archive must have been stored in the city of Durhumit,2 where he stayed during the last years of his life and where eventually he died and was buried. () The texts from the Kanesh archive, relating to his work and his ac-tions are probably to be understood as a scattered sample that happened to end up here, presumably because he was staying in this house occasionally and received letters and engaged in other activities that led to the writing of texts (AKT 6a, 8-9). His house also contained many documents of his elder brother Iddin-abum, although he must have had his own house with a separate archive. The dates and subject matter of these documents made Larsen conclude that when he was a very young man he may have shared a house and archive with his brother (from where his texts were never removed) and that, much later, after his death, col-lected documents relating to his affairs were brought to the house of his brother, who was the executioner of his estate. Shallim-Assurs eldest son, Ennam-Assur, probably was the main inhabitant of the house, but he was murdered only a few years after his fathers death, in ca. 1865 BC.3 Next we have ca. 200 texts associated with the affairs of the latters younger brother, Ali-ahum, who must have been the last person to use this house and to deposit texts here, several of which deal with attempts to obtain blood money for his murdered brother. But since none of them is later than ca. three years after this murder, while he must have lived con-siderably longer, the later texts were not stored in this house, where he prob-ably did not live, so that the documentation for his last years is no longer extant. In fact no dated records from the last 25 years, before Kanesh was destroyed in ca. 1835 BC, have been found and Larsen considers it likely that the house was in fact not lived in during this period and may have been used exclusively for storage. Fortunately, the texts it contained were not removed (AKT 6a, 11-13).4

2 An important city and colony, ca. 250 km north of Kanesh, the center of the Anatolian cop-per trade.

3 The texts are dated, according to the Assyrian custom, by means of the name of an impor-tant eponymous official in the City of Assur, head and manager of the City Hall, who was elected annually. This institution was created during the first year of king Erishum I, according to the Middle Chronology ca. 1870 BC.

4 Concerning the archive excavated in 1993 in grid LVII/127-128, with texts from three

30

A second feature is that, as mentioned in some records, groups of texts for a variety of reasons could be taken out of an archive and brought elsewhere, fre-quently to Assur. A trader could move to Assur in old age and take records along, as shown by the witnessed record EL 141:1-10, The containers with tablets of Enlil-bani and the containers with copies we entrusted to Iddin-Kubum and he brought them to Enlil-bani. When a lawsuit, by appeal, was transferred from krum Kanesh to the court of the City of Assur, records to be used as evidence were shipped there. EL 298:9ff. describes how in a conflict about a debt the authorities of krum Kanesh entrusted to an attorney of the plaintiff a sealed box with ten sealed documents, including four formal letters (napertum, missive) of krum Kanesh, four missives of a trader sealed by the krum and two records dealing with the debt in question, which (lines 35-36) he will submit to the City and our Lord (the ruler). When a trader died and his business had to be liquidated and his inheritance divided on the basis of his last will which was always kept in Assur this had to take place after heirs and relevant records had been brought together in Assur, as a ruling of the City stated (Veenhof 1995, 1725-7). And we have seen in the previous paragraph how a large file on the affairs of a dead trader was brought to the house of his brother, who was the executor of his estate.

In some cases, after a trader had died, particular records in his archive could be required to prevent unfinished transactions from being frozen and to pay or collect debts. In such a case formal authorization could be given to open his safe and take out assets and tablets. Two records inform us about what happened in this way with the archive of Elamma. CCT 5, 3 reports that after his death the sons of his partner had opened the strong-room and taken out a sealed debt-note for 12 pounds of silver, declaring: We act at the order and under the responsibility of his investors. They were, as usual in such situations, accompanied by a com-mittee of impartial outsiders (ahitum), who looked on and afterwards sealed the door of the strong-room together with those who had entered. And in Kt m/k 145 people declare: On the basis of a verdict of the plenary krum the scribe seized us and we entered Elammas house and broke the seals of the strong-room, which we left there. Agua took two coffers with tablets. In the deposition (BIN 6, 220+) that is part of a large file, studied by Matou 1969, about what happened when the trader Puzur-Assur died, his sons state: When our father Puzur-Assur had died the investors and creditors of our father, having entered his sealed strong-room, took 12 boxes with tablets and entrusted these to you.

The destruction of the houses in krum Kanesh in ca. 1835 BC did not come as a complete surprise, no unburied skeletons were found, nor valuables (silver, gold, items of bronze) in the strong-rooms. This suggests that the inhabitants man-aged to flee in time and it is reasonable to assume that they took along a num-

generations of traders, Michel 2008b, 58 observes that the number of texts of the second own-er, Ali-ahum, son of Iddin-Suen, is not substantial (ca. 50 letters, 11 loan contracts), presumably because he also had a house in Burushhattum, and one in Assur.


ber of records, in particular those recording valid debt-claims and investment contracts, perhaps also title deeds. This situation helps to explain why in general records of the last twenty years of krum Kanesh level II are fairly rare. But there must have been other reasons too, perhaps the move of traders from Kanesh, the administrative centre of the trade, to cities and colonies in the north and west, which were the centers of economic activity. Larsen, in the introduction to AKT 6b points to the apparent collapse in the commercial activities of the Assyrian businessmen [that] probably had its roots in legal and economic problems asso-ciated with the death of a whole generation of important merchants.5 Whatever was the case, there is no evidence that, when a number of years after 1835 BC the rebuilding of what became krum Kanesh level Ib started, Assyrians tried to re-trieve records from the earlier ruins.

Finally, we have to assume that the enormous number of written records ac-cumulating in the archives made traders from time to time decide to remove texts that were no longer valid or necessary. Most commercial transactions were finished in a few years6 and their records did not have to be preserved, as hap-pened with title deeds or marriage contracts. Only in particular cases, such as with a joint-stock company that would run for ten years, did records have to be preserved for longer periods. This explains why records from the oldest period, when the scope of the trade was also more limited, are relatively rare,7 but we know almost nothing about the removal of records, apart from returning debt-notes when they were paid. We occasionally meet references to records we would expect to find, but which are missing, but we do not know why. The ar-chive of Kuliya (AKT 5) contained eight, in part overlapping lists (texts nos. 62-69) that enumerated in all 50 tablets of various kinds, apparently present there; the biggest one lists 27 tablets placed in a big box. Since none of these tablets was found in the archive, the list may have been drawn up to select and identify documents that were removed, but we do not know why and where. In general one gets the impression that outdated records were not systematically discarded and that much depended on the habits and zeal of the archive owner, who usu-ally had room enough to store them, while reading and selecting them may have been a cumbersome task. Some old documents, such as large memoranda enu-merating all outstanding claims, may have been preserved for their informative value, letters from relatives and wives for emotional reasons. The archaeological record unfortunately is not clear enough to show whether old, outdated records

5 The issue is studied in the framework of a monograph by Barjamovic-Hertel-Larsen 2012.

6 The terms of commercial loans, actually the consignment of merchandise given on credit to traveling agents, usually did not exceed one year. Also the notes and accounts of expenses paid en route by the leader of a caravan lost the value after the accounts had been settled.

7 The absence of early dated records (the oldest one preserved is from eponymy year 47) is not surprising, since nearly all are debt-notes and they were returned or destroyed when the debt was paid (see also below note 34).

32

may not have been stored in separate containers or even rooms. No hoards of discarded tablets were found outside the archival rooms and houses, used as fill or for paving a floor, as happened in Babylonia.

Every archive also contains groups of records that cannot be linked with its owner or related to his business, which I have called elsewhere (Veenhof 2003, 115, 5.2) strange records. Various explanations for their presence are possible. There were people without a house in the krum, e.g. caravan personnel, trave-ling agents and relatives who stayed in Kanesh for some time. They may have deposited their records in the archive of their boss, as is clear for an employee of the trader Imdilum. Traders traveled a lot and might temporarily move to other places and in such cases they might give valuable records in safe-deposit (ana nabm ezbum) to a friend or colleague. The most impressive piece of evidence is a large tablet in New York (CTMMA I, 84), where a trader, whose strong-room had been emptied out by a partner, enumerates and describes 25 records of all kinds, including tablets of others, which they had left in deposit with me (l. 40),... all contained in two sealed containers (lines 60f.).8 In several cases such deposited records were apparently never retrieved by their owners, who may have died or disappeared. As already mentioned above in connection with the archive of Shal-lim-Assur, traders did move and could live only temporarily in a house, judging from the presence of groups of records belonging to them alongside the more substantial archive of the owner or main inhabitant of the house. Ccile Michel observed that the archive edited in TPAK 1, basically that of Shumi-abiya, also con-tained 25 letters of a certain Assur-mutappil, some still in unopened envelopes, but not a single debt-note of his. She assumes that he deposited his letters with Shumi-abiya when he left Kanesh, but did not return; some letters addressed to him that had arrived after his departure were never opened and read (33-4).

2. Traders in different situations and contexts

The circumstances under which traders lived and worked in Kanesh could be dif-ferent and this had a bearing on their archives. We may distinguish the following situations:

a) A trader as the head of a family who had moved to Kanesh, while leaving his family, that means his wife and young children, behind in Assur. All impor-tant family records are in Assur and this situation generates a correspond-ence between husband and wife. The lively business correspondence is with the traders male relatives, investors and especially his representatives in As-

8 That the victim could give a long, detailed description of all these tablets implies that he had kept a list of them.


sur, who take care of his interests, receive his silver, buy merchandise for ex-port and equip his caravans. His sons in due time might join him, assist him in the business and when they are grown up develop their own commercial activities, to be continued after his death.

A good example is Pushuken, father of four sons, who was active in Kanesh for more than 20 years and died there. His business was continued mainly by his son Buzazu, who lived in his house, where his fathers archive was left in place,9 to which he added his own records. It contained i. a. letters sent to Pushuken by his wife in Assur and also many texts dealing with the division of Pushukens inheritance among his children, in which his eldest daughter, a priestess in Assur, played a prominent role.

b) A variant to this type is the successful trader who after many years returns to Assur and leaves the business in Kanesh in the hands of his by now experi-enced son, whom he assists and advises in letters sent from Assur, while also carrying on some business of his own. The son took over his fathers house and archive, apart from the records his father had taken along when he re-turned to Assur, presumably records of affairs that still had not been finished, although this is not easy to prove, for we have no texts from Assur.

The best example is the prominent trader Imdilum, whose father Shu-Laban was already active in Anatolia, who led the business there at least 17 years, returned to Assur around 1880 BC and was succeeded by his son Puzur-Ishtar. The latter is attested for fifteen years, the last seven after his father had died. The father in Assur kept writing letters to his son, which we have to distin-guish from copies of letters written by him when he still lived in Kanesh.

c) A young man who moved to krum Kanesh to trade there in the service of or

in cooperation with his father who remained in Assur. The latter, the boss of the family business, conducts a lively correspondence with him and also sup-plies him with merchandise, money, advice and information and in return receives the silver sent back from Anatolia, which he uses to pay debts and taxes and to equip a new caravan.

A good example is Assur-nada, son of Assur-idi, whose archive was published in Larsen 2002. It shows us a father much concerned about what his son does, such as the latters failure to meet promises (of votive gifts) made to the gods, and also burdened with the task of caring for his sons children, after the lat-ters wife, who had stayed in Assur, had died. Another example is Ennum-Assur, the oldest son of Shalim-ahum, a merchant and capitalist living in As-sur and the main business associate of Pushuken (mentioned under a). He

9 All texts dealing with Pushuken were unearthed and sold by the local villagers early in the 20th century and there exists no general description of his (reconstructed) archive, although we can now identify almost 350 letters and dozens of legal documents that belonged to it.

34

lived, temporarily perhaps together with his brother Dan-Assur, in a house in Kanesh, whose archive was excavated in 1970 and partially published (without the tablets still in sealed envelopes) as AKT 3. The archive, not sur-prisingly, contained letters of the father to his son(s) and letters written by Ennum-Assur when he traveled and worked elsewhere in Anatolia, to his wife Nuhshatum. She had to take care of and guard his house and the archive and was occasionally instructed to retrieve documents from the archive for particular purposes.

d) A grown-up son who had moved to Kanesh with his wife, when he had become independent or his father in Assur had died and he had inherited his share in his fortune. He started a business and family life there and his sons in due time would work with him and get married. In his archive we may also find contracts and records relating to their family life and the business correspond-ence is with male relatives, his representatives and his investors in Assur.

A good example is Elamma, the younger son of Iddin-Suen, an energetic im-porter of merchandise from Assur (which he occasionally visited), whose ar-chive, excavated in 1991 and 1992, I am publishing. He lived in Kanesh for more than thirty years (opposite the house of his elder brother Ali-ahum) and had a lively correspondence with his representatives in Assur. His busi-ness was carried on after his death by some sons and his energetic widow, La-massatum, who continued to live in the house for several years and conducted some business of her own. The archive also contains records dealing with the division of his fathers, his own and his wifes inheritance and records about and letters from various family members living in Kanesh or Assur, such as a file about the death, funeral and inheritance of a twice married daughter,10 and letters of his favorite daughter, who was priestess in Assur.

e) In some cases an archive contains a number of records of the father of the trad-er, but this depended on his age and where he lived, in Assur or Anatolia. We have e.g. no records of Pushukens father Suejja, who lived in Assur, and only a few of Imdilums father Shu-Laban, of whom it is not certain that he lived in or visited Kanesh.11 In Ali-ahums house in Kanesh, excavated in 1993, with an archive of more than 900 texts, a few dozen letters addressed to his father Iddin-Suen were found, but no debt-notes. Ccile Michel12 assumes that these letters, which all have low excavation numbers, had been stored separately af-ter his death, when his son Ali-ahum (active there since ca. 1895 BC) became

10 I studied this file in Veenhof 2008b.

11 Larsen 1982, 224 assumed that the father, who appears already in ca. 1910 BC (ICK 2, 104), died early and that Imdilums uncle Assur-imitti, who lived in Assur, took care of the interests of the family, before Imdilum himself is attested in the sources, 18 years later.

12 Michel 2008b, 58, footnote 1.


the owner of the house and the archive. This contrasts with the archive of Id-din-Suens second son, Elamma (who lived across the street in Kanesh), whose house, which he must have acquired or built when he became an independent trader,13 did not contain documents of his father. The archive of Shallim-Assur, son of Issu-arik contained a few letters to and records of his father, but no let-ters written by him after he had returned to Assur, presumably because he died there soon (AKT 6a, 6). After the death of a pater familias his inheritance was apparently divided and his firm liquidated, whereupon his sons could start their own business.14 In most cases one of the sons acquired the house in Kanesh, where his mother might continue to live, with his fathers archive left in place, to which his own and his mothers records would be added.

3. The krum organization

The archives excavated, while clearly those of private entrepreneurs and their families, also reflect the fact that the Old Assyrian traders belonged to a commu-nity and organization of traders. They all originated from the same city, Assur, and had all settled abroad, far from home, in a completely different environment and society, without military protection. This stimulated forms of cooperation (mu-tual aid, business partnerships, representation, etc.), but it also took a more struc-tural form. The totality of the Assyrian traders in Kanesh formed a kind of corpo-ration, called krum. This term originally meant the quay, harbor district that every Mesopotamian city had, where bulk goods arrived by boat, and then also the commercial quarter where traders met and finally its inhabitants as a group. A krum could comprise foreign traders, who might organize themselves as a group, at times with a leader (called its head), to cooperate and to be better equipped to deal with the local powers. Krum Kanesh was a well-organized, hierarchical organization, which comprised a plenary assembly, the krum great and small that met as an assembly (puhrum), and knew a committee, designated as the big men, who ran the daily affairs. The plenary krum appears frequently as court-of-law to solve the many, mostly commercial conflicts between its members.

The krum as organization had a building, the krum house, where meetings were held and its secretary worked, which housed a cella with the statue of the god Assur (by whose dagger members would swear), and had storage facilities and an archive. The krum arranged and supervised the presumably semi-annual general accounting of krum Kanesh (nikkass a krim Kane), which involved both individual traders and the krum as such. They were necessary because of

13 The oldest dated text in which he occurs, as creditor, is from ca. 1905 BC, much earlier than his elder brother, but the latter apparently first operated from Assur, before coming to Kanesh, perhaps after the death of their father.

14 See Larsen 2007 for this development.

36

the many credit operations and book transfers between members, for account-ing the results of collective commercial transactions organized by the krum to which its members could subscribe, and for settling accounts (on taxes and cred-it sales) with the local palace, whereby payments and transfers were regularly channeled via the krum organization.

Krum Kanesh was also the administrative head of the colonial network that consisted of at least 25 other krums and trading stations (wabartum), spread over central Anatolia. As such it functioned as an extension of the government of the City of Assur, to which it was responsible and whose directives it had to apply. It maintained the diplomatic relations with the many city-states and rulers in Ana-tolia, with whom treaties had been concluded, and stepped in when problems arose. It could also issue orders and rulings, and traders in other colonies could appeal to the authorities of krum Kanesh for justice.

The archive of the krum probably contained records (or their copies) ema-nating from these activities, such as official letters and verdicts, and we have references to tablets of/in the krum-house on which traders were booked/registered for certain amounts, which they owed the organization or it owed to them.15 Since the krum-house has not been found, we do not have the archives of krum Kanesh, but many texts it produced and also received (letters from other colonies and from the City of Assur and its ruler) are known and give us a wel-come insight into its workings. They are frequently referred to or quoted in the business correspondence and several (copies) of them were found in the archives of the traders. As a self-governing institution the krum had its members per-form various administrative, commercial and judicial tasks and in doing so they produced or were given records and letters, some of which (in part duplicates) ended up in their archives. The orders and verdicts of the krum were sealed by members who administered them and acted as its court-of-law and special mem-bers (called lm) could represent the krum in financial transactions. Messengers in temporary service of the krum, sent out to other colonies with official letters and orders, might take their copy of such texts home when they returned.16 The traders in whose cases the krum intervened by letters, orders and verdicts appar-ently could acquire duplicates of these records. And this was also the case with official letters of the City, addressed to the krum, which dealt with an issue that involved a particular trader. The texts of three treaties concluded between the As-syrians and some Anatolian rulers were all found in private archives, presumably

15 See Veenhof 2003, 1.1. There is e.g. mention of a big tablet of the krum-house and of a traders deposits [booked] on the third and sixth tablet of the krum-house, but we do not know the system.

16 The role of the messengers of the krum is described in Veenhof 2008c, 224-46, and there one finds samples of official letters carried by messengers. A large selection of official letters of the Assyrian authorities is offered by Michel 2001, Ch.1.


because their owners had represented the krum when they were negotiated and concluded and had retained a copy of the text.

4. A classification of the texts

The records in the archives can be classified in several broad categories:

a) Letters, which comprise usually ca. 30-50% of the texts of an archive. The main types are letters related to the caravan system, letters that report on a variety of commercial and legal problems (frequently small files around a particu-lar incident), letters from and to family members, and official letters, by the authorities in Assur or in Kanesh and their agents. An overview is offered by Michel 2001, who presents 400 of them in translation, divided into seven chapters, each with its introduction, dealing with the Assyrian and the Anato-lian authorities, the caravan trade, smuggling, commercial partnerships and joint-stock companies, family firms (three samples), and the correspondence of women.17

b) Legal documents, usually ca. 30% to 40% of the texts, an important older sample of which (340 records) was published long ago in EL in a careful classification. They can be distinguished in two types. The first consists of contracts of vari-ous types, of which debt-notes, service contracts with personnel, transport contracts, contracts on settling accounts, and quittances are most numerous. Next there is a limited number of contracts concerning family life (marriage, divorce especially when a trader married an Anatolian bride and inherit-ance) and a large variety of other contracts, e.g. concerning securities, joint-stock companies, partnerships, and contracts that served as title deeds, about the purchase of houses and slaves in Anatolia (frequently from defaulting debtors, whose pledges were forfeited)18. The second comprises a great variety of records that emanate from and reflect the administration of justice, such as protocols of private summonses, testimonies, oaths sworn, interrogations, agreements, records of arbitration, mediation and adjudication, together with protocols of lawsuits and of verdicts by the various colonial authorities. In addition verdicts by the City Assembly of Assur, which issued also strong letters of the City (Assur), written to help a plaintiff whose case has been con-sidered valid by the legal authorities.

17 Other collections of published letters are those related to the caravan system, studied in Larsen 1967, the letters in Prague, published in Prag I, those in the Assur-nada archive edited in Larsen 2002, and translations of letters in the recent volumes in the AKT-series.

18 See for such contracts B. Kienast, Das altassyrische Kaufsvertragsrecht, FAOS Beiheft 1, Stutt-gart 1984.

38

c) Lists, memorandums and notes, usually ca. 20-30% of the texts, ca. 600 of which, mostly unearthed before the official excavations by the local villagers and therefore devoid of their archival context, were edited in Ulshfer 1995. Alongside a variety of short notes about expenses, distributions of bread and meat, small payments, settlements, deposits, etc., the more important catego-ries are: lists of packets of silver and gold, the yield of the trade, but also gifts for

various persons, entrusted for shipment to Assur; large memorandums (tahsistum) that register all a traders transactions

that had resulted in debt-claims that still had to be paid; lists of records present in his archive at a particular moment, probably

drawn up as inventory or because they were transferred.

5. The functions of the texts

Old Assyrian documents are not only very numerous, but there is also no body of cuneiform texts that contains so many references to the writing, reading, send-ing, transfer, use and storage of written documents. That is because the success of the OA trade depended on them and they were indispensable for three reasons:

a) In the system of overland trade based on a colonial network there was a con-stant need of communication, of passing on information between traders liv-ing or working at home (in Assur), traveling in the caravans (six weeks from Assur to Kanesh), living in Kanesh or in one of the many commercial settle-ments spread over Anatolia. Oral communication did take place, but the trade would have been very difficult and much less successful without this written communication.

b) The trade was so sophisticated and dense that is there were so many simul-taneous transactions of an at times complex nature that the human mem-ory was unable to remember all the data. They had to be written down to aid the memory, to prevent problems and in the interest of good accountability.

c) The nature of the trade and the value of the goods traded on many levels and in many situations required valid records (uppum harmum), that is records whose contents are certified by the seals of parties and witnesses impressed on its envelope. By issuing valid records traders could obtain and use capital of investors and money-lenders, buy on credit from the City Hall in Assur, and they used them to contract caravan personnel, employ commission agents, sell on credit, and provide and obtain securities. They not only informed them on transactions, but also provided evidence to be used if problems arose that had to be solved by private summons, arbitration or formal lawsuits.


Written documents therefore had three partly overlapping functions, as means of communication, as aid to memory and as evidence. These functions must also have determined the preservation of the records, but here many things are un-certain. Many letters may have been preserved because they contained impor-tant business or other information, but others, such as letters from wives and family, presumably often for emotional reasons. Most letters of both categories must have lost their informative or evidentiary value after a few years and were or could have been thrown away, but we cannot establish to what extent that happened. The preservation of records with a lot of valuable data (e.g. the large memorandums) and records with evidentiary value (e.g. of contracts, invest-ments, etc.) is understandable, but most of the commercial records too lost their value after the transactions recorded had been completed and accounts had been settled, for they are different from marriage contracts, title deeds, or records of the division of an inheritance. Such texts, including judicial records confirming rights that had been contested, had a lasting value, as OB archives show, which occasionally contain records more than a century old. Most OA loans and cred-its were for a year or less and only investment loans (ebuum) and contracts for joint-stock companies (in which traders used capital made available by inves-tors) could have a longer duration, up to 10 years in some cases. And even though we find some very old debt-notes, possibly never paid and therefore preserved, and we meet a few references to credit not paid back for a very long period, this does not change the fact that the great majority of the records in the archives no longer had any practical or legal value. We have to assume that once deposited in an archive, as long as there was space available to store them, records had a good chance of remaining there. Sifting, which required reading and classifying them, presumably did not have priority. When a son succeeded his father and in-herited his house or when a trader moved elsewhere, to Assur or another colony, their records (or at least part of them) would be left behind. It seems rather likely that groups of older records that were no longer needed and were not thrown away were stored in separate containers. Some of the inscribed (but not sealed) bullae may have identified them, such as AKT 6a, 16, Tablets concerning our Iddin-abums debts, which could be related to groups of records of Shallim-Assurs elder brother, found in his archive (see above 1). Unfortunately the excavation reports never identify the tablets that were found together in a particular con-tainer or as a group, nor where exactly such bullae were found.19

The three functions mentioned of course obtain whenever texts are written, but they apply in particular in the framework of the OA overland trade and its colonial system.

19 More such bullae were found in Shallim-Assurs archive, e.g. Kt 94/k 879, Memorandums concerning agents, and Kt 94/k 1062, Validated records of my witnesses concerning the sons of Iddin-abum, see zg-Tunca 2001, 347-9.

40

5.1. Communication

The colonial system meant that members of the same family and firm were regu-larly and at times for long periods separated by considerable distances, not only between Assur and Kanesh, but also between the nearly forty colonies and trad-ing stations spread out over the whole of Central Anatolia and Northern Mesopo-tamia. In this situation letters were of vital importance. We can distinguish busi-ness letters, private letters especially those exchanged with wives and other relatives and official letters, written by the Assyrian authorities, both in Kanesh and in Assur.

Among the business letters an important category are those required by the system of overland trade by donkey caravans. They were called notifying mes-sages and caravan reports by Larsen 1967. The first type sent from Kanesh and from Assur reports that a caravan with silver and gold or one with tin and textiles had left Kanesh or Assur and summarily mentions its load, the persons involved, also with instructions about what to do with the goods. Those dealing with caravans with silver and gold leaving for Assur must be archive copies kept in Kanesh. The second type reports on the arrival of the caravan at its destination. Those sent from Assur, Larsens caravan accounts, mention the arrival of the money and describe in detail how it was used to make various payments and in particular for equipping a new caravan: the purchase of merchandise and don-keys (with numbers and price) and the hiring of personnel; the Assyrians them-selves called them letter of purchases. Those written in Kanesh, again archive copies, report on the safe arrival of the merchandise from Assur, its clearance in the palace (payment of taxes, etc.), the expenses incurred en route and the first sales made. Such letters may well have been sent ahead of the caravans they de-scribe, to inform their recipients in time about what was coming. Known dupli-cates may indicate that a second copy was given along with the caravan. These letters must be used in combination with the transport contracts drawn up for these caravans and the detailed accounts of the expenses made by the leader of the caravan. The few cases where we have all four texts for one caravan are informa-tive in showing to what extent requests and orders were or could be followed up. Such letters were also used to check whether the good

Archives

Documents

Transcript of Archives