How intensive was the communication between the central administration and its provincial extensions, and how much of this communication took place in the form of written correspondence? These are not easy questions to answer, since all messages were not written down and certainly not always written on clay, and since it is clear that an unknown quantity of the only type of despatches that are actually extant today, clay tablets, must be either destroyed or otherwise not available for study.
What does one do in this situation with a text like CT 53 904, cited above, where the writer, a governor of Der, states that he was in possession of 1,000 'seals' (i.e., sealed orders?) of the ruling king? That is a figure 30 times the total of all royal orders extant from Sargon and 100 times the total of all letters extant from that particular governor. If every royal order required a written answer, and if the round figure of 1,000 'seals' is even tolerably accurate, our corpus of Sargon letters would be only a pitiful fraction of the original correspondence, which might have comprised some 250,000 cuneiform letters alone (2 x 100 x 1,300 = 260,000). Since Sargon ruled for 17 years, this would mean some 15,300 letters per year and an average of 42 letters a day — not an unthinkable figure in itself for a big empire.
But is such a picture actually realistic? There are several weak points in the above reasoning. First of all, while royal messengers certainly had to return with an answer of sorts, the formulation of many extant royal orders implies that a written answer was not expected, but a simple implementation of the order sufficed. Frequently, the purpose of the order was simply to summon the addressee and/or his troops to the capital or elsewhere to meet the king. In fact, it would seem that much if not most of the communication between the king and his governors took place orally, either in the context of periodic visits to the capital or at specially arranged meetings. Whenever a matter of major importance or emergency arose, a governor would avail himself of the express service and take himself to the king personally, leaving his deputy in charge of the affairs of the province. Only in the case of routine matters, or when a personal visit to the king was not necessary or feasible, would communication by letter have been in order. Thus the number of letters from provincial governors and the like may have been considerably fewer in number than those by the king.
In the second place, while the term 'seal' in letters certainly refers primarily to royal orders, there is no guarantee that the 1,000 seals in CT 53 904 were in fact all royal orders. The royal seal was impressed on all kinds of official documents issued by the king, such as grants, edicts, and even shipments of goods and raw materials. Thus it seems that the total volume of Assyrian administrative correspondence was substantially smaller than initially considered, and my personal guess is that the maximum number of letters received by any Assyrian king in the course of his entire reign was probably closer to 10,000 than 100,000.
However that may be, a sample of 1,300 letters is not negligible by any standards and can be safely considered representative for the whole of the original correspondence. As a matter of fact, it covers the whole provincial system of the empire and about ten years of Sargon's reign. There are thus more than 100 letters from each year, on the average. From some correspondents there are more than thirty letters, from others only a letter or two. Whatever the original extent of the correspondence, this distribution is very likely to correspond to realities. There were only a few officials who maintained a 'regular' correspondence with the king; the great majority of administrators received written orders from the king, but only rarely wrote to the king themselves.
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola, 'Volume of Correspondence and Intensity of Communication', The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part I: Letters from Assyria and the West, SAA 1. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1987; online contents: SAAo/SAA01 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa01/administrativecommunication/volumeofcorrespondence/]