Clay was by no means the only writing material employed in the Assyrian empire. Papyrus, leather and wax-covered writing-boards were also commonly used in administrative bookkeeping, as amply documented in contemporary pictorial and textual evidence. The use of these different materials was not indiscriminate, however, but carefully regulated, largely depending on the language in which the relevant document was written.
Assyria was a bilingual society and administrative documents were routinely drawn up both in Assyrian and Aramaic. Documents in Assyrian were written in the cuneiform script and usually on clay. Papyrus, which had to be imported, appears to have been reserved primarily for documents in Aramaic. Leather was used for sketches, drawings, plans and probably for writing Aramaic as well. Writing-boards, which were expensive but reusable, were used primarily for recording ephemeral information such as inventories of booty, deportees, etc. There is no evidence that they were ever used for writing letters, even though they are frequently referred to as attachments to them.[[12]]
While Aramaic script, language and writing materials thus were an established part of Assyrian administrative routines, there is every reason to believe that, at least up to the end of the eighth century B.C., Assyrian administrators communicated primarily in Assyrian. This is implied not only by the volume of the present correspondence but also by several other considerations, not least by the basic fact that Assyrian was the language of the rulers, Aramaic that of the ruled. A most interesting piece of evidence comes from a letter of Sargon to Sin-iddin of Ur (CT 54 10):
It would seem that Sargon was definitely against receiving letters in Aramaic from his own administrators — perhaps largely for reasons of pride, but possibly also for reasons of safety. (Intercepted Aramaic documents could certainly have been read by a great many more people than ones written in cuneiform.) However that may be, we have reason to be grateful to him, for had he yielded to the pressure for a simpler writing system, the letters edited in the present book would not exist.
A major shift to the use of papyrus and/or leather in administrative correspondence probably took place soon after Sargon's death. Where are all these documents now? Only a few letters of the present type are extant from the reign of Esarhaddon (680-669) on.
12 E.g., no. 99 r.12 of the present edition. For a more detailed discussion of the different writing materials in Assyrian administrative bookkeeping see my article in CRRA 30 (cf. note 1 above), p. 225f.
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola, 'Writing Materials and Language', 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/writingmaterialsandlanguage/]