Hired Labor in the Neo-assyrian Empire

1. Introductory Remarks For the understanding of any state and any society it is vital to have a grasp of the key principles of its economic basis. Yet for the Neo-Assyrian Empire our knowledge is still severely limited, in contrast to the NeoBabylonian Empire where the field of economic history has long enjoyed popularity among modern scholars. At the root of this problem lies the extremely differential nature of the available primary documentation. The business records of temple households and private family firms from several major Babylonian cities, which constitute the vast majority of the known Neo-Babylonian sources and offer a wealth of information for the economic historian (see now Jursa 2010), have no parallel among the texts from the main NeoAssyrian archival sources of Nineveh and Kalhu. These cities served as the centers of the Empire and were intimately linked to the Assyrian kings and their courts. They are certainly not representative of all of Assyria or even all of its urban environments. Most of the texts unearthed in Nineveh and Kalhu come from palace contexts. They have shaped the perception of Assyria in the first millennium BC more than any other bodies of texts, and their focus and limitations explain in part why key economic issues, such as the very nature of labor in Assyria’s economy, have found relatively little attention. To survey “labor in the Assyrian Empire” is beyond the scope of the present paper which limits itself to a discussion of labor for hire.1 The