These facts suffice to show that it is a mistake to approach the adê texts from the narrow viewpoint of 'loyalty oaths'. Basically, they are all binding political agreements, pacts or treaties, whose exact nature was determined by the mutual status of the contracting parties. The particular nature of the present corpus derives from the gross imbalance of power between the contracting parties, the other party being the king of Assyria.
As ruler of a superpower, the Assyrian king was in a position to dictate the terms of most agreements he concluded and to obtain unilateral concessions from the other contracting party. However, it is important to realise that this was not always the case. Situations arose in which the Assyrian ruler too was forced (or saw it as advantageous) to make concessions in order to obtain an agreement he desired. The extent of the concessions he was ready to make was of course directly related to the bargaining power of the other contracting party. Seen in this light, the texts in this book can be conveniently divided into two basic types: agreements involving, and ones not involving, concessions from the Assyrian king. In other words, we are simply dealing with various types of 'bilateral' and 'unilateral' agreements. We shall refer to them as treaties, since the other contracting party in each text was either a ruler or a nation, usually both.
In order to fully understand the nature and function of these treaties, It is necessary to carefully consider the typical situations in which the Neo-Assyrian treaties were concluded. We can study the matter from royal inscriptions and other contemporary documents, which refer to numerous treaties in addition to those actually preserved. Sifting this evidence, one is struck by an interesting and rather unexpected observation:
Relatively few of the treaties were actually 'imposed' on the other contracting party. On the contrary, most of them, even ones clearly belonging to the category of unilateral treaties, were concluded at the initiative of the other, 'subordinate', party. How is this possible, if the terms of the treaties were as unequal as they seem to us?
The answer should be obvious. In each case, the other party had temporarily something very important to gain from Assyria (mostly military aid, but also political backing, alliance, or simply peace) in exchange for the concessions it made. In other words, even seemingly unequal treaties may once have been viewed as 'pretty good deals' by the party whom we now classify as the losing one.
This, in any case, was the official Assyrian position in the matter. Every treaty concluded by the Assyrian king was portrayed as a royal favour toward the other party, who came to beg for it on his knees - the idiom was "to grasp the king's feet" - so that "favour", "benefit" (ṭābtu) in effect became a synonym of "treaty" (adê). These 'favours' had a price tag attached to them though, the treaty terms, which may not have seemed of great consequence at the time when they were imposed but in practice often meant the loss of the 'beneficiary's' political independence.
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola, 'Bilateral and Unilateral Treaties', Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths, SAA 2. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1988; online contents: SAAo/SAA02 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa02/treatiesasinstrumentsofimperialism/bilateralandunilateraltreaties/]