This group is concerned with lists of people with which the Assyrian administration had dealings - usually of a utilitarian nature. A privileged few, of higher status, are to be found described in their social and geographical origins; but the majority that we shall encounter is formed by those whom the Assyrians found or reduced, and thus consequently considered, in a condition of social inferiority, whether as POWs or runaway slaves or deportees. For these people, the administration has little, if any, interest as individuals; it is therefore not surprising to find that in the main these lists - rarely dated, most frequently in the form of the occasional memo or docket - bear only names, numbers, and the essential administrative observations on the many hundreds of people who appear on the scene for a fleeting moment.
Nos. 145 and 146 are two fragments in which personal cases about to be presented to the king are recorded. As is known, the Assyrian royal audience was an occasion for the subjects to speak out their individual grievances against the administration, and/or to appeal to the ruler as a superior judge of wrongs received. The documentation of such appeals and requests for a personal hearing stems in the main from the contemporary letters (cf. Postgate, CRRAI 19 [1974], pp. 417ff); these fragments, therefore, are a welcome addition to the body of evidence on the matter. In no. 145 the case would seem to be a takeover of a property, with all ensuing benefits denied to its former owner, despite promises to the contrary by the chief cupbearer. In the second text, the "problem" is not self-evident; possibly a subject had lodged a protest against the conduct of one Zizibayu, who had freed (the subject's?) slaves and given them over to his own daughter as inheritance. A further text possibly concerning royal audiences is no. 147, though this is by no means certain due to the fragmentary condition of the tablet.
Lists of people and of their owners are represented by no. 148; the properties listed exclude "all that he gave to the god" - the subject possibly being a provincial governor. In no. 150, transactions involving persons are recorded in single sections, dated; the extant fragment shows the eponyms of 7 12 and 713 BC.
A particular group of documents has to do with Babylonians, and should be all of 7th century date. Two texts, nos. 153 and 154, list individuals of various professions, giving their patronymics, their pertinence to a specific lineage (qinnu), and the localization of their paternal house in the city of Babylon; in the second document, complete families are also recorded. The people listed were all of the older and established layer of Babylonian society: notice the two well-known lineages of Gahal and Egibi (no. 153:4, r.8), and the many residences adjoining well-known topographical features of the city; a Cuthaean is also mentioned in no. 154. No. 155 is a memorandum on a group of Babylonians who have been assigned to individual bakers, presumably as apprentices. Intellectual tasks on the many series of tablets in the palace libraries of Nineveh are, on the other hand, the destination of the young Babylonians listed in no. 156, a memorandum which should be dated to Esarhaddon' s reign (cf. LAS II, p. 458): the youngsters are again scions of wealthy and powerful families.
The lower level of society - the fugitive serf or slave, the criminal - is, as said above, statistically more abundant in this material . No. 159 records men physically "seen" or "missing," city by city; no. 162 is an intriguing memorandum, broken at the top, which would seem to record the fact that two cohort commanders and two other individuals bearing West Semitic (and Arabic) names were in charge of mutually returning the fugitive people and/or camels of the Arabs and those of the woman Samsi. The situation, however, is far from clear, since the woman Samsi could well be identical to the "queen of the Arabs" mentioned in the annals of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon. No. 163 is a further list of fugitives by city ; no. 164 is a list of courtiers taken away from the plunder of an enemy town; and no. 165 is a register of sheep thieves.
Deportees in the proper sense of the term (the technical term was possibly ERIM.ZI) are dealt with in a number of lists, such as no. 167, which have a weird resemblance to the classifications of sheep and cattle seen above. The adult men are labelled ERIM.KALAG.MEŠ, "able-bodied men" ; then the male children (DUMU.MES) , the adult women (MI.MEŠ) and the daughters (DUMU. MI.MEŠ) are listed. Both the sons and the daughters, however, are divided in categories of a mixed age/size classification: the youngest members are "sucklings" (ša GA) ; then comes the "weaned" age (pir-su/si); and the older ages are measured by the childrens' height, using the measure of the rūṭu, "span" or half-cubit, of approx. 25 cm (cf. FNALD, p. 25, §2.3.1; Fales Censimenti, pp. 118ff), i.e. 3 to 5 spans' height. The 5-span measure - corresponding to the height of a teen-ager - may however at times be replaced by a more fluid notion of age, ṣahurtu, "adolescent" (cf. no. 173). As may be also seen from no. 177, partial totals at the end of the various lists may group together individuals by sexes (ERIM.MEŠ and MÍ.MEŠ), or divide adults from "children" (TUR.MEŠ; notice also the MÍ.QÁL.MEŠ in no. 171).
The rūṭu-system, i.e. this classification of people by age/size categories, could have been developed to allow an "objective" sorting of subjects, i.e. in practice to do away with enquiries on the age-perception of the classified people themselves. In any case, it represents, for all its crude appearance, one of the most far-reaching and most efficiently standardized results of the Assyrian administrative machine. We find it in use in many sale documents of land and people (cf. SAA 6, passim); we find it as one of the basic tools of classification of the "Harran Census" and other cadastral documents. It is not surprising, therefore, to encounter the rūṭu-system here and there in these lists of displaced people: in a tally of Egyptians (no. 169), in a list of men with their families (no. 195), and in a further fragmentary inventory (no. 200). Below this classificatory level, our lists of deportees are reduced to a sea of names, undoubtedly interesting in a broader outlook on the onomastic and cultural components of Assyrian society, but fatally devoid of any trace of the bearers' personal history.
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate, 'Deportees and Displaced Persons', Imperial Administrative Records, Part II: Provincial and Military Administration, SAA 11. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1995; online contents: SAAo/SAA11 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2021 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa11/militaryadministrationandpopulationmanagement/deporteesanddisplacedpersons/]