These texts, with the sole exception of no. 2 16, were assembled within the Kuyunjik collection and published together by C.H.W. Johns in 1901, as constituting
Johns' philological work on this group of documents was particularly good, and his discussion of the overall layout of the tablets and the technical terms of the content was extensive; but perhaps exactly for these reasons his edition ended up in a sort of critical limbo, to re-emerge only seventy years later, in the wake of a renewed interest in Neo-Assyrian society and economy. In 1973, an updated edition of the Harran texts appeared (Fales Censimenti, nos. 1-22); therein, and in the discussion which ensued, a number of new suggestions regarding the overall archival context, the dating, and the arrangement of the fragments were brought forth (Postgate, JESHO 17 [1974] 225ff; Parpola, ZA 64 [1974] 96ff). Such questions will be reviewed briefly here, as they remain crucial for our understanding of the "Harran Census" documents.
The texts of the "Harran Census" are undated, and show no unifying label; but an overview of the contents shows that group is internally homogeneous from many different points of view. Although they stem from the central archives of Nineveh, their geographical outlook ( cf. Fales Censimenti, pp. 93ff) yields a Northwestern Mesopotamian regional context: that of the Harran region and areas adjacent to it, essentially in the basin of the river Balikh, and in zones immediately to the west (Sarugi, Hadattu) and the north (the region of Kipani, a toponym attested in an Assur stela and royal inscriptions, probably from an Aramaic word meaning "rocky area"). The surviving fragments also yield one toponym (Magrisu) to be sought eastwards, in the Khabur triangle. No urban sites appear directly in the texts: the listed real estate pertains to the rural world of the village and the hamlet (kapru), which may at best be located (ina) qanni, "near" a larger town or a city, but on the other hand may be deep ina madbar, "in the steppe," its sole reference being a particular province. This overall picture finds a clear counterpart in the onomastic data (cf. Fales Censimenti, p. 99ff): many personal names in these texts celebrate Sin and Nusku, the male deities of the Moon cult based in Harran, and among them a particularly high percentage is of West Semitic, and especially Aramaic, affiliation. For these geographical and social/linguistic characteristics, the "Harran Census" stands decidedly apart from most of the remaining NA cadastral material, such as the independent schedules of land and people, in the next section of this volume, or those possibly attached to the royal grants, to be published with the latter (see below).
The typology of the lists also presents a number of particular and unifying aspects. A common feature for the majority of documents in this group is a division of the tablets through rulings in columns and thereupon in sections; the contents of a typical section may be defined in general as a holding, comprising people and real estate, which are in the main listed in the following order:
Less easily noticeable, on the other hand - in view of the fragmentary nature of the evidence - is a further common trait of the collection, which appears once every few sections: the name of an individual, explicitly described as the owner of the previously listed holdings. The estates were obviously of quite different sizes and types, and the tablets consequently allotted different spaces to each: thus we find up to two landowners named in the preserved parts of nos. 203 and 207; while in other texts, single landowners are mentioned, their titles indicating various degrees of power in the local Northwestern Mesopotamian élite: "In all, 2 holdings, of the governor of [Naṣibin] a" (no. 202); "Total, of Adad-remanni, [chief cook] of Harran" (no. 213); "Total of the estate of Sin-ereš, cook, whom Adadremanni, the chief cook of Harran, promoted" (no. 203).
Summing up all the above considerations, we obtain the overall "profile" of a series of texts, in which varying numbers of rural holdings were listed in groups, according to the identity of their respective proprietors. Random notations in the lists speak for at least a partial search for the information on the estates through "fieldwork": some items are described as "inspected" (e.g. the vines and orchards in no. 203 iii.5), the list of sheep may present the accompanying notation EŠ.GÁR, "tax quota (assigned)" (e.g. nos. 205 ii.5'; 206: 10'), and some information on the properties seems to have been gathered directly from the owner (e.g. "Total - except what is on the debt-note": no. 205 ii. 6'ff) or awaits the owner for its completion (e.g. "the arable land, I know not; they will ask Se'-ahadi about it": no. 203 r.iv.13). That the problem of ownership was a central issue in these texts, may also be indicated by a few cases of small parcels within the holdings dubbed explicitly ša ramanišu(nu), "of his/their own," i.e. belonging exceptionally to the people listed in the registers themselves.
Despite all these data, the exact purpose or administrative occasion of the series is unspecified in the texts themselves, and thus it remains perforce a matter of theoretical reconstruction, whether remnants of a general-purpose "inventory" or of a more "project-specific" tally are represented here. In any case, the editors believe that at present "census" is probably not a fully adequate characterization of these texts. Taking into account the fact that the rigidly hierarchical lists of people and land betray an ordering by owners, and not by geographical location, even within the relatively limited regional range covered, this corpus seems scarcely plausible as a random portion of a general inventory, or even of an "open-ended" archive, of land use and occupation spanning the whole of Assyrian territory. Quite to the contrary, in fact, it might be assumed that the goals or limits of the lists were as specific as what we find in the extant sample: i.e. the identity of a number of large landowners of Northwestern Mesopotamia with the register of their individual holdings, broken down by plots and the relevant workgroups.
At this point, the sole remaining objective would be to discover or deduce what could have been the wider scope, or the specific occasion, for making out such a compilation. The problem of dating the texts takes on a particular importance here: but it must be said most of the available dating criteria prove ambiguous or ineffectual when applied to this series (Fales Censimenti, p. 2ff). On the basis of the identification of an individual named in no. 206, Gir-Dadi "from the town of Ti[l-. . . " with one Gir(i)-Dadi, known from a letter to Sargon as city lord of Til-turi, S. Parpola suggested a date for the compilation during the late reign of Sargon, or perhaps in the reign of Sennacherib (ZA 64 [ 1974] 108). As for the occasion, it has been suggested that the "lands enumerated are those properties in the area in question, which were exempt from taxation" (Postgate, JESHO 17 [1974] 229ff). These two proposals might be connected, and the compilation of the "Harran Census" could be referred - at least as a working hypothesis - to the vast operation of tax-exemption undertaken by Sargon upon his ascent to the throne, by which the kidinnūtu that the cities of Assur and Harran had enjoyed of old, and that had lapsed, was "restored" (cf. Luckenbill, ARAB II, § 78 and passim). Apart from Sargon's self-laudatory utterances in his annals, we have no information on how a measure of this magnitude was put into practice: perhaps the "Harran Census," as a register of the landed properties in the area around the exempted city, was one of the administrative instruments prepared (through a detailed "field investigation") for the enterprise.
In their present state, the texts of the "Harran Census" are a group of larger or smaller multi-columned tablets and fragments, which were considered relevant to a single archive in the first edition by Johns, although it was generally agreed that two documents, nos. 219 and 220, resp. concerned with parcels of farmland assigned for labour to Gambulean deportees, and with a list of smiths of various ages, were to be set slightly apart from the main group, although sharing many compositional traits with the latter (cf. G. van Driel, BiOr 27 [1970] 175f). Also, some reduplication of data in two of the larger "census" fragments had been pointed out (Fales Censimenti, p. 37). Proceeding further on this line, S. Parpola (ZA 64 [ 197 4] 98ff) suggested a twofold division of the material, on the basis of the following factors: ( 1) ways of listing people (detailed: :with omissions), (2) specific orthographic habits, (3) typology of the geographical indications. The two resulting subgroups should, in Parpola' s reconstruction, go back to two different scribes: scribe A would be responsible for the larger and more detailed tablets, such as nos. 201, 202, 203, etc., while scribe B would have condensed the same information - at a later date - in the more compact format of texts such as nos. 205, 206, etc. However, as Parpola himself noted (ibid., p. 106), the material is too fragmentary to act as proof for such a reconstruction; and, in point of fact, recently made joins have brought a fragment attributed to Parpola's scribe A (ADB 9), to connect with others purportedly authored by scribe B (ADB 11, ADB 12, ADB 16) toward a larger text (no. 209).
In any case, if we also take into account the general physical characteristics of the texts ( column width, line distance, size of signs, and thickness of the tablet), an inner division of the "Harran Census" documents is undoubtedly visible, and it appears to follow, by and large, the guidelines of Parpola's analysis. The editors have thus divided the group of tablets and fragments bearing "scribe A"-type characteristics (nos. 201-212) from a smaller number of others written in a "scribe B" -type manner (nos. 213-218); the two unusual texts no. 219 and no. 220 have been placed by themselves at the end. This is by no means a "final" layout of the series, not only because many a gray area in the division by groups remains, but also because the administrative and historical rationale behind the two different scribal hands, and the small but significant number of items of mutual juxtaposition, finds as yet no full and adequate explanation, almost a century after the editio princeps of the "Harran Census. "
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate
F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate, 'Harran Census', 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/harrancensus/]