Hired labour in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Abstract

For the understanding of 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 can only be described as marginal in this respect, unlike for the Neo-Babylonian Empire where the field of economic history has always been popular; at the root of this lies of course the fact that the available primary documentation is extremely different: 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, have no parallel in the finds yielded at Nineveh and Kal~u, cities that are intimately linked with the Assyrian king and certainly not representative of all of Assyria or even all of its urban environments. But it is the texts from Nineveh and Kal~u, originating mainly from the royal archives, that have shaped our appreciation of Assyria in the first millennium more than any other body of texts. This explains in part why economic key issues, such as whether hired labour even existed in Assyria’s economy, have remained ignored or left undecided. It is this question that I will try to adress in this paper, and to anticipate my conclusion, the answer is an emphatic yes.