With the private land grants of Assurbanipal (nos. 25-34) we reach a new departure in the style and nature of these grants. It must be borne in mind, however, that we have not seen a private grant since the time of Tiglath-Pileser III and therefore we do not know when this style may have begun or whether the change was as abrupt as the 70+ year gap in attestation (730-657) would seem to indicate. No. 18, a fragment that was placed with the earlier grants because of its dissimilarity to the Assurhanipal and Aššur-etel-ilani grants, might, as we have no evidence to the contrary, equally well belong to the time of Sargon, Sennacherib or Esarhaddon. To show that this gap does not represent a cessation of grants, we again refer to the letter SAA 10 173 where the writer speaks of a field given to him by Esarhaddon sometime around 680 (presumably at the time of his accession; ''The father of the king, my lord, gave me 10 hectares of cultivated land in Halahha. For 14 years I have had the use of the land."). The letter shows clearly that the land itself was given, indicating the continuation of the tradition of the Adad-nerari and Tiglath-Pileser grants.
In the Assurbanipal grants on the other hand it is clear that the property is already owned by the grantee and that what is being granted by the king is exemption from all taxes and duties on the land and its personnel: "The fields, orchards and people which he acquired under my aegis and made his own estate, I exempted (from taxes) and I wrote down and sealed with my royal seal and gave to NN, who respects my kingship." There follows a listing of the taxes and duties from which the land and its people are exempted, more elaborate than in earlier grants, but these have already been discussed in detail in both NARGD and TCAE and need not be gone into again here. These grants contain another boon that has no precedent, and that is the right of the grantee to be buried wherever he pleases, presumably in the palace, surely a signal honor. Particularly unpleasant curses are directed against anyone who would disturb his grave, and here we differ from NARGD and CAD in the interpretation of kakdāmi, preferring to see it as a construct form of kakku, "weapon," plus dāmu, "blood," echoing Johns· original translation, "sword of vengeance"; [[29]] the verb is rēš x kullu, an idiom meaning "to await x."
There are a number of these Assurbanipal grant documents (nos. 25-26 and 29-34), the text of all being, with the exception of minor variants, identical. Presumably they were all copied from the same master with only the name and title of the grantee changed. Four examples preserve the name (or title) of the grantee (nos. 25, 26, 29 and 30) and the first two of these have the same date preserved (9.VIII.657) making it likely that all of these texts were written at the same time and that the grants were made on the same occasion. We doubt that this occasion was, as suggested in SAA 6, p. XXXIX, n. 22, the retirement of the grantees since the beneficiary of no. 26. Nabû-šarru-uṣur, would serve as eponym official more than 10 years in the future.
The physical characteristics of the tablets on which these texts are written are quite distinctive: they are large (ca. 25 x 13 cm) and thick (ca. 4-5 cm) and are carefully written in large clear script, having a framing line around the edge of the tablet. With a line of impressions of the king's own seal across the front, they were elegant and commanding documents, obviously meant as showpieces and to impress even the illiterate with their significance and importance.
Another break from earlier grants embodied by these texts is that the details of the exempted property and its personnel were not included in the grant itself, but in a separate schedule linked to the main document by the name of the principal grantee. These schedules shared the same physical characteristics as the grant document, being on large, thick, clearly written tablets, although lacking the framing line around the text.[[30]] Fortunately, we have preserved both a grant document and its attendant schedule (no. 26 and nos. 27-28) making the system used quite clear. Although the titles of Nabû-šarru-uṣur are broken away in the schedule and even though Nabû-šarru-uṣur was a quite common name at this time, [[31]] there is no reason to doubt the connection between the two documents nor the supposition that this is the same Nabû-šarru-uṣur who was eponym sometime after 648. Johns believed that the horizontal ruling after Nabû-šarru-uṣur's name marked the beginning of a schedule to a different grant, [[32]] but in our opinion this is unlikely and the continuation of the tablet merely enumerates additional properties of Nabû-šarru-uṣur. In our view, the schedule to a grant would have been an integral part of the grant that would have accompanied the grant document itself. To assume that the schedules to two or more grants would have been on the same tablet reduces the schedules to the status of administrative texts, a purpose for which they were poorly suited.
It is possible that if the list of exempted properties was short it might have been included in the grant document itself as in the the grants of Aššur-etel-ilani (see below), but there is no evidence of this in the preserved Assurbanipal pieces. Conversely, if the list was exceptionally long it may have been continued on one or more additional schedule tablets in a manner similar to the multitablet grants suggested above for the time of Adad-nerari III.
29 ADD IV.p. 166.
30 See the photograph of the obverse of no. 50, Bezold Cat. V, pl. X I.
31 Cf. Fales, SAAB 2 [1988] 105-24.
32 ADD IV. pp. 200-201; cf. SAA 6, p. XXXIX, n. 22.
Laura Kataja & Robert Whiting
Laura Kataja & Robert Whiting, 'Assurbanipal', Grants, Decres and Gifts of the Neo-Assyrian Period, SAA 12. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1995; online contents: SAAo/SAA12 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2020 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa12/grantsoflandandtaxexemption/assurbanipal/]