As already intimated above, from the archival point of view the corpus is composed of two types of legal documents. A large part (in fact, the majority) of them are connected to other documents of the corpus through an individual centrally involved in the transaction, who also appears in the same or similar capacity in the other documents. Such individuals, who mostly figure in the deeds as either purchasers or creditors, are referred to in this volume as central persons, and the dossiers of documents associated with them will be called 'archives,' however inappropriate this term might be in this usage. The central persons figuring in the present volume and the sizes of their respective archives are surveyed in Table III. As can be seen, some of them are quite large, comprising more than 20 (in one case, more than 50) texts or fragments.
A most interesting fact immediately emerges from a study of the table. The persons figuring in it represent different professions, but professions largely interconnected with each other and reduceable to a few major classes or types. We have, first of all, a group of four royal charioteers whose dossiers, counted together, alone account for 1/4 of the texts included in this volume. Next, there are the dossiers of the harem governesses and village managers already discussed, which probably belong together, and counted together account for another 1/4 of the volume. This leaves us with the dossiers of four prominent individuals whose professions are largely unknown, but who include at least one cohort commander and a person (Silim-Aššur) promoted to a high state office under Assurbanipal.
Thus the central persons represented in the present volume can be reduced to two basic types: persons involved in the administration of the harem located in the SW Palace, and charioteers and military officers attached to the service of the king and the crown prince. This basic division also holds for the central persons of the later dossiers to be included in Part II [http://oracc.org/saao/saa14] of this edition. That documents relating to the administration of the harem should be kept in the royal archives seems natural, but the presence of dossiers of royal charioteers and military officers on the same premises (and not their own private archives) requires an explanation.
We suggest that the persons concerned constituted a special case because of the potential danger they posed to the safety of the king. Royal charioteers and commanders of the royal bodyguard had unique access to the person of the king, and it was therefore essential that the latter could absolutely count on their loyalty. This was secured by money, gifts, favours and privileges poured upon the individuals concerned. On the other hand, it was also essential to make sure that the wealth accumulating to these persons did not swell to such proportions that it in itself started posing a threat to the state. For this reason, we suggest, their business transactions were kept under royal control and the relevant documents, or copies of them, had to be stored III the royal archives.[[22]]
The rest of the corpus not assignable to the central persons listed in Table III consists of isolated transactions by a variety of individuals. Some of these can be identified as members of the ruling class and include persons such as Šadditu, sister of Esarhaddon, and Abi-rami, sister of the Queen Mother (nos. 251f, both surely residents of the harem); royal eunuchs (nos. 23, 283 and 287); further bodyguards, charioteers and military officers (nos. 19, 116, 127, 139, 140 and 295), as well as a doctor of Esarhaddon (no. 126).[[23]] It is extremely likely that many more persons figuring in these texts also belonged to the ruling class, but their identity largely remains to be estabhshed.
22 Later on, at the retirement of these officials (if they had remained loyal), their possessions could be exempted from taxes, whereby a document listing the exempted property was prepared in the palace on the basis of the original documents which would have been subsequently destroyed. Cf. the grants nos. 9-12 in NARGD, and notice that the text ADD 741+ edited as no. 23 in Fales Censimenti is very likely to represent an appendix to NARGD 10 (dated 657 B.C.). This would explain why no documents relating to business conducted by Assurbanipal's chief eunuch Nabû-šarru-uṣur (the beneficiary of the grant) are extant in the Nineveh legal corpus. Lines 32ff of Fales Censimenti 23, separated with a dividing line from the preceding section listing Nabû-šarru-uṣur's property, could represent a similar appendix to another grant, possibly to Remanni-Adad (cf. l. 34 with nos. 329-331 of this volume). If so, the question remains why Nabû-šarru-uṣur's original documents would have been destroyed while Remanni-Adad's were not.
23 This text is interesting because it is dated 697-VI, when Esarhaddon would have been only about 15 years old (see LAS 2 p. 231, n. 390, and cf. the discussion ibid. p. 230ff).
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola, 'Central Persons', Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, Part I: Tiglath-Pileser III through Esarhaddon, SAA 6. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1991; online contents: SAAo/SAA06 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa06/natureoftheninevehlegalarchive/centralpersons/]