Die mittelassyrischen Personen- und Rationlisten cms Tall Seh Hamad/Dur-Katlimmu.

• Author: Gauthier, Paul

Die mittelassyrischen Personen- und Rationlisten cms Tall Seh Hamad/Dur-Katlimmu. By SAQER SALAH. Berichte der Ausgrabung Tall Seh Hamad/Dur-Katlimmu (BATSH), vol. 18. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2014. Pp. lxxiv + 454, plates. [euro]118.

This volume is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing corpus of Middle Assyrian administrative documents. While the current corpus is hardly lacking in personnel texts, the concentration of so many personnel texts from a single place and time is without parallel. There is much to be gained from studying them, and Salah's editions offer an excellent starting point.

The work includes full editions of all the texts along with copies and photographs. In addition, the introduction includes an impressive study of the various family histories which can be traced in the texts. The texts can be divided roughly into three groups. The largest are texts involving the disbursement of rations to various named individuals. There is also a sizable group of texts which simply list personnel. Finally, there are a little under a dozen texts dealing with garment manufacturing and distribution.

There is a wealth of information in the texts. Here I will mention but two particularly interesting aspects. A number of texts divide the population of Dur-Katlimmu and its dependent town of Duara into four groups of about 25-50 people, each associated with a rab hanse "captain of fifty." That these groups and their captains existed is not new. However, in the texts from BATSH 18 one can trace their composition through time. As it turns out, membership in a particular "fifty" was generally passed down from father to son. That is to say, the Assyrian population at Dur-Katlimmu was apparently divided into stable, hereditary groups.

The second point relates to the siluhlu unfree labor force. As we learn from the texts already published in BATSH 9, the Assyrian state employed a number of siluhlu in agricultural work at Dur-Katlimmu. Based on those texts one might get the impression that most of the population at Dur-Katlimmu was unfree. But, thanks to the texts in BATSH 18, we can say that they were only a small portion of the population. Whereas the records show a population of 30-40 siluhlu active in the area at any one time, the personnel lists routinely mention 120 or more "free" individuals. Suggestively, one might also note that the siluhlu were divided into three groups at Dur-Katlimmu and a fourth at Duara. These map uncannily...