The Arrows of the Sun: Armed Forces in Sippar in the First Millennium B.C.

• Author: Levavi, Yuval
• Position: Book review

The Arrows of the Sun: Armed Forces in Sippar in the First Millennium B.C.. By JOHN MACGINNIS. Babylonische Archive, vol. 4. Dresden: ISLET-VERLAG, 2012. Pp. viii + 135, text copies.

The book under review sets out to examine various aspects of the armed forces in the city of Sippar, based on the materials from the Ebabbar archive. It covers the Neo-Babylonian and the Achaemenid Empire, treating them as a single unit. The book is divided into two parts, the analysis (pp. 1-51) and the text editions (pp. 54-111).

Following an introduction, chapter two deals with the recruitment and organization of the temple contingents. It is divided into three sections, based on the military professions: infantry, cavalry, and chariotry. The third chapter deals with the units of free citizens and chapter four examines the fief system. The military officials and the chain of command are described in chapters five and six. Military campaigns are dealt with in chapter seven, as is the evidence for foreign prisoners of war in Sippar.

The second part of the book presents editions of fifty-four previously unpublished texts from the British Museum Sippar collection. The transliterations and translations are completed by copies made by Cornelia Wunsch. The commentary is kept to a minimum, which is to be expected given the straightforward administrative nature of the texts.

Among the authors new and fruitful observations concerning the military organization one could mention his suggestion that a pair of archers formed the basic unit of the temple archers and that these pairs were then grouped together into an eight-man decury unit (p. 7). Also interesting, although not without difficulties, is his reconstruction of the military chain of command from top (sarru) to bottom (sirku) (p. 37).

The main value of the book may lie in the text editions. The copies and transcriptions are precise, and the translations are accurate and clear. The textual commentary, while justifiably concise as mentioned above, is quite informative and places the texts into their archival and historical contexts.

Just occasionally, some of the prosopographical notes seem somewhat problematic; e.g., regarding the identification of a shepherd named Bel-usatu (no. 20), MacGinnis (p. 77) points to three other attestations of a shepherd of this name, CT 55, 662, 684 (Nbn), and CTMMA 7.8.10 (8 Npl). Since there is a gap of at least sixty-five years between the texts, it is unlikely that we are...