As pointed out in SAA 11, pp. XXXVI-XXXVII, the system of granting tax exemption by the king on land in various parts of the empire would have required some sort of administrative support system, at least to the extent that records of the exempted land and individuals would have been available to the palace and that provincial governors would have been informed of land in their provinces that was not subject to taxation. Alternatively, the lists of property found in the grant documents must have had a source from which the documents were compiled. In either case, there must have been administrative records that contained the same information as found in the grant texts although not necessarily in the same format.
The land grants frequently contain long lists of properties and the personnel attached to them, either included in the grant itself (e.g., nos. 35-36) or in a separate list attached to the grant as a schedule (e.g., no. 26 and no. 27). Unfortunately, there are a number of administrative texts (and to a lesser degree, legal texts) that contain information of the same type. Included among these are lists of personnel (SAA 11 173, 177-200), schedules of land and people (SAA 11 221-34), census texts (SAA 11 201-20) and purchases of large estates or entire villages and personnel (SAA 6 59, 326, 329-33, 335-36, etc.).
When these various types of texts are complete, there is, of course, no problem assigning them to their proper category. Even fairly large fragments can usually be attributed because of the characteristic physical properties of each group. But as the pieces get smaller the identification of the nature of the original tablet can become quite problematic. Because of the difficulty of distinguishing fragments of the different types of texts, the editors of SAA 11 would have preferred to include at least the land grants of Assurbanipal and Aššur-etel-ilani and the schedules to the land grants in that volume in order to avoid the possibility of separating fragments that may have originally belonged to the same tablet, be it administrative or a grant. This proposal was not practicable because the grant texts are not, strictly speaking, administrative texts and also it did not address the problem of the possible confusion of fragments of grant texts with legal texts. It was decided by the Editor-in-Chief to maintain the organization of the volumes according to text genre and to rely on the distinguishing characteristics of the text types to keep them separate.
The land grants of Assurbanipal and Aššur-etel-ilani have a very distinctive format, being written on very large and thick tablets. The schedules to these grants share this format. In the schedules, the properties and their personnel are simply written one after another usually with no attempt to subdivide the text or group the entries in any way. While this is an adequate format for the actual grant document, which probably would never be consulted for any practical purpose, it is not at all suited to administrative work. To find an entry one essentially has to read through the document until one encounters it. Texts used for administrative purposes need to have easier access to the information they contain and are characterized by shorter lines, which means that large tablets are usually divided into columns, and by frequent rulings into sections with the sections summarized or otherwise identified.
Furthermore, the demographic information given in the grants and schedules is of the most summary nature, most often consisting of only a name, frequently with a profession, and the notation adi nīšīšu "and his people." Sometimes this notation is simply repeated with ditto marks or KI.MIN. By contrast, administrative texts that contain similar information provide more detailed[[19]] demographic information, usually giving at least the number of people in the family and frequently the names of all the adults and their relationship to the head of the family. Although it is agreed that there must have been lists of tax-exempt persons and properties for administrative purposes, it is not possible for the more detailed administrative texts to have been derived directly from the sketchily detailed grant schedules.
The notation adi nīšīšu is found in land grants where the schedule of exempted properties is embedded in the grant document (nos. 8, 35-38) and is thus known to be a feature of the grants. It may seem like circular reasoning to claim on the basis of this that the presence of this notation identifies a fragment as part of a grant or a schedule to a grant, but the simple fact is that the notation is not attested once in any positively identifiable administrative text; it is just too vague to be of any use in an administrative text. The expression does occur in legal texts, but rarely[[20]] and in the majority of cases it refers to a village and its people rather than a person and his family.
Much more common in the legal texts is the notation x ZI(.MEŠ) following the name of the head of the household: "PN (and his people, a total of) x persons" (cf. SAA 6 Glossary s.v. napšutu), a notation which also appears in administrative texts (SAA 11 ibid.) but usually in an expanded form where the family members are listed (or at least enumerated by categories). This notation is also found in land grants, occuring in nos. 7, 16, 27 and 63. The first is an Adad-nerari III grant while the second may be part of one from the time of Tiglath-P ileser III and the last uses mixed notations including adi nīšīšu. The x ZI(.MEŠ) notation also occurs in the votive donations of Sennacherib (nos. 86-87) and in the private votive donation no. 98. In short, no a priori assumptions about the nature of a fragment containing this notation can be made solely on the basis of its occurrence.
In summary, the following criteria can be used to distinguish land grants from the time of Assurbanipal and Aššur-etel-ilani from fragments of administrative (and legal) texts: large thick tablets with many signs per line (i.e., not ruled into columns); lists of names and properties run-on into a long list, generally without division in to sections by horizontal rulings or detailed summaries; summary demographic information characterized by the very vague adi nīšīšu "and his people."[[21]] The presence of the notation x ZI(.MEŠ) is not a sufficient indication of a grant without some corroborating evidence, but an impression of the king's personal seal is an almost certain guarantee of a royal grant or decree.
19 In the case of the census texts, much more detailed; cf. SAA 11, pp. XXXI-XXXII.
20 From the 350 legal documents presented in SAA 6, only four examples could be culled: SAA 6 59:2-3, 101:7, 264:6-7, 283 r.2; and in the more than 450 texts remaining to be published only two more could be found: ADD 472:3 and ADD 627:4.
21 The notation adi nīšīšu might presumably occur in an administrative text referring to a village and its people as in the legal texts, and if the antecedent were lost such a fragment could be confused with a grant or legal text.
Laura Kataja & Robert Whiting
Laura Kataja & Robert Whiting, 'Administrative Texts', 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/introduction/administrativetexts/]