Jursa 2024, Names of Babylonian Officials
Ranking names of courtiers & commissioners reveal changing attitudes to kingship..
The Source:
Michael Jursa, ‘Names of Officials (Beamtennamen)’, in Personal Names in Cuneiform Texts from Babylonia (c. 750-100 BCE), edited by Caroline Waerzeggers and Melanie M. Groß, Cambridge University Press 2024
Chapter: Names of Officials (‘Beamtennamen’)
Typology of Names Containing the Element šarru ‘King’
Semantically, a larger group of names expressing a wish or blessing for the king has to be distinguished from a much smaller group in which the king is essentially a stand-in for a theophoric [dict. bearing the name of a god] element in that a wish is addressed to him. In the following discussion, references for names whose bearers were demonstrably royal officials will be flagged by adding the person’s title or function. The absence of such a flag, however, does not necessarily mean that the person in question did not have a background in the royal administration; it only means that relevant information is lacking. …
Wishes and Blessings for the King:
… By far the most šarru-names have the pattern DN-šarru-u ̇sur ‘DN, guard the king’. Essentially the whole range of theophoric elements … appears in these names, from rare and mostly local deities to the ‘great’ gods of the dominant Babylon theology. …
… Apart from the king, the crown prince is the only other member of the royal family who appears in names: DN-mār-šarri-u ̇sur ‘DN, guard the crown prince’ (BM 103477; a vice governor of the Sealand). …
Blessings from the King:
… The second category of names – more varied than the first, but with far fewer attestations – focuses on the king not as the recipient of divine blessings implicitly requested by the bearer of the name, but as a fount of blessings in his own right. Functionally, the king replaces a divinity in such names. This is most explicit in the name Šarru-ilūa ‘The king is my god’ (YOS 3 159; a rab musahhirī official), but the fact also evinces clearly from the following name pairs. …
‘Life comes from the king / Marduk’
‘Under the protection of the king / Bēl’
‘My eyes are on the king / Nabû’
’The king / Nabû has revived the dead’
‘Who is like the king / Nabû’
‘The good comes from the king / Nabû, the good is overwhelming’
‘The royal image / Bēl has spoken’
‘The king / Nabû has strengthened (the name-bearer)’
‘Let me be satiated by the bounteousness of the king / Esagil’
‘The king is (my) fortress / Nabû is the fortress of the individual’
Also in this type of name, the crown prince makes an appearance: Mār-šarri-ilūa ‘The crown prince is my god’ (YOS 7 195). Finally, it should be noted that the only Babylonian family name that invokes the king, LUGAL-A.RA.ZU(-ú), may belong to this name type. Its exact reading and interpretation are uncertain but A.RA.ZU should stand for taslītu ‘prayer’ or for a form of sullû ‘to pray’.
None of the names in this second group, which cast the king in a (quasi-) divine role, comes from a source that post-dates 484 BCE (i.e., the major break in the continuity of Late Babylonian history). The first group, which invokes divine support for the king, on the other hand, continues (though with less frequency) beyond 484 BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
To some degree, these are proxy data for the development of Babylonian attitudes towards kingship. For the long sixth century, the continuing relevance of traditional sacralised kingship cannot be doubted. Thereafter, it was no longer common to consider the king on a par with the gods.
The pertinent names are no longer attested, even among the numerous Babylonians who had close ties to the royal administration and who occasionally would still bear names invoking the gods’ protection for the king. In the Hellenistic period, even this latter name type disappeared, probably because of the disappearance (from our view, at least) of royal officials of Babylonian origin.
The Social Range of ‘Beamtennamen’
For establishing the intended message of a ‘Beamtenname’ (defined here as names invoking the king), it is easiest to start with the observation that the use of these names was restricted. Kings or members of the royal family did not bear them, unless they had been named before they or their family members gained the throne, as was the case with Nergal-šarru-u ̇sur (Neriglissar) and Bēl-šarru-u ̇sur (Belshazzar), son of Nabonidus. ‘Beamtennamen’ are also conspicuously absent among the Babylonian urban upper class – that is, the propertied landowners, be they priestly rentiers or more entrepreneurially oriented landowners. Only a few individuals bearing a family name had a ‘Beamtenname’ as a given name or as a patronym. This suggests that the message that a ‘Beamtenname’ sought to project was not part of the general outlook of this class of people.
The ‘bi-polar’ temple administrations are the sector of state administration in first millennium BCE Babylonia that we are best informed about.
[MH: to quote Jursa from his here-referenced 2015 publication “temple administrations … were bi-polar institutions, in which descendants of local priestly families worked side by side with representatives of the central government”.]
There, descendants of local priestly families worked side by side with representatives of the central government. The latter were typically designated as qīpu ‘(royal) commissioner’ or as ša rēš šarri bēl piqitti ‘courtier (and) supervisor’.
While both groups were dependent on royal approval, they hailed from different backgrounds. For priests, their origin in certain families was normally a precondition for their access to office. The family background of the royal officials, by contrast, is less clear: they were very rarely even given patronyms, let alone family names. The crown, not their own family, was the principal point of reference that these individuals related to and from which they drew their legitimisation, as seen in their not infrequent conflicts with local priests.
This allegiance to the crown is what ‘Beamtennamen’ were intended to signal.
However, it is by no means true that the majority of officials bore such names. Of the twelve royal commissioners in Sippar, only five had a ‘Beamtenname’; in Uruk, only five of thirteen. Of the thirty courtiers … eight have a name including the element šarru; in Uruk, it is 30 per cent. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, among the twenty-one palace officials named in what is preserved of the pertinent part of Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘Hofkalender’, just one person had a ‘Beamtenname’. In light of this data, the question arises as to whether it was entirely optional for officials to bear such a name.
There is no direct evidence about the moment and circumstances when an official received a ‘Beamtenname’. If such a name was selected by a person’s parents, or by the name-bearer himself, this might be seen as an aspirational act – an indication of a hoped-for career or allegiance. If such a name was awarded at his actual appointment to office, it was very likely conferred upon him by the same authority that invested him with the office.
Ethnicity is likely one important factor here. From a social and ethno-linguistic point of view, the royal administration had a different setting than the city and temple administrations. In the bilingual environment of Babylonia in the sixth and later centuries, the crown was far more open to the use of Aramaic than the temple administrations or the Babylonian urban bourgeoisie. The Aramaic scribes (sēpiru) that appear in the documentation from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II onwards were usually employed by the crown. In the Persian period, royal Aramaic scribes were made obligatory members of the board of temple administrators. An investigation of the largest distinct group of royal officials – the courtiers (ša rēši) and their fifth-century homologues, the chamberlains (ustarbaru) – shows that many of these men were of non-Babylonian origin. Some were Arameans or generally West Semites; a significant number was of Egyptian extraction, especially after the Persian conquest; and yet others were of Elamite or Iranian origin, or they bore names that resist etymological explanation.
Arguably, many of these courtiers were at least partly deracinated [uprooted] professionals of administration who owed what privileges they had to the king. Their identity rested in their name and title, as the naming customs in administrative and legal documents bear out: while an ordinary Babylonian needed to be named with his patronym and, if applicable, with his family name to be fully defined from a legal point of view, for a courtier his own name and his title were sufficient: there was no legal need for further details.
Courtiers of non-Babylonian extraction must have been under pressure to integrate also with respect to their name. Such a scenario probably lies behind the double name of ‘Maše-Emūn, son of Sa-x-tukku, the royal courtier, whose name is Iddin-Nabû’. While this man took an unmarked Babylonian name, it is highly likely that in many other cases a name was chosen that reflected the allegiances of the courtier, a ‘Beamtenname’.
I would suggest that this is the raison d’être of many of these names not only for courtiers but also for royal officials in general. Sometimes, we get confirmation of this hypothesis in the form of non-Babylonian patronyms or non-Babylonian ethnic affiliations of bearers of ‘Beamtennamen’. Of a total of eighty-two bearers of ‘Beamtennamen’ for whom patronyms are known, twenty men had a demonstrably non-Babylonian background. …
… The evidence is sufficient to argue that ‘Beamtennamen’ will very often have been a signal of achieved or intended integration and loyalty given by, or required from, (relative) outsiders. However, while such a signal was not required from everyone – not all officials bore ‘Beamtennamen’ – is it possible to say that whoever actually did bear such a name did have a close relationship to the crown? …
… Several points are clear, though. First, as stated earlier, the likelihood that a bearer of a ‘Beamtenname’ was a member of one of the well-established urban clans, and especially of a priestly clan, is very remote. Second, the more unusual šarru-names are strong signals for an affiliation with the royal administration. This is true, for instance, for the types DN- balā ̇t-šarri-iqbi, DN-šarrūssu-ukīn, DN-šulum-šarri, and DN-mār-šarri- u ̇sur. All (or nearly all) bearers of such names can be shown to have been officials based on their titles or the context of their attestations.
In other cases, we may well lack information that would allow us to place bearers of ‘Beamtennamen’ in their proper context. To quote one example, a relatively large number of such names are found among the shepherds and chief shepherds working for the Eanna temple, such as the ‘chief of cattle’ (rab būli) Arad-Bēl, son of Šarru-ukīn, and his brother Anu-šarru-u ̇sur, son of Šarru-ukīn, who also was a shepherd. Two šarru-names in two generations must be indicative. Nothing in the attested activities of these men suggests a close relationship to the crown, but we know that shepherds were to some degree outsiders who had a contractual relationship with the temple, and they may well have been drawn from a segment of the Urukean population that depended on the king.
On the other hand, however, we regularly encounter šarru-names among temple ‘oblates’ (širku). Two examples from the Eanna temple are Anu-šarru-u ̇sur and Eanna-šarru-u ̇sur. These individuals owedservice obligations to the temple and did not have a close – or, indeed, any – relationship to the crown; in fact, we can probably exclude the existence of such a relationship. This is sufficient evidence to state that a ‘Beamtenname’ is not a fail-safe indication for identifying an official. The reason why humble oblates like those mentioned earlier might bear a ‘Beamtenname’ eulogising the king – a kind of name that is, after all, quite rare and thus ‘marked’ – cannot be established. The reason will have lain in their personal histories.
One possible pathway is suggested by the following evidence: ‘Ea-šarru-bullit, slave of Nabû- šarru-usur, the courtier’ and ‘Šarru-mītu-uballit, slave of the qīpu’. These slaves of two royal officials bear ‘Beamtennamen’. The message of the names – which were almost certainly given to them by their masters – reflects the values of the name-givers, the masters. It is thus conceivable that oblates [religious connection] with ‘Beamtennamen’ had a similar background to these two slaves: they might have been manumitted slaves of officials who had been gifted to the temple to serve it as širkus.
Conclusions
Names built around the element šarru ‘king’ either eulogise or bless the king, or they cast him in a quasi-divine role. The second type falls out of use after the end of the long sixth century, the first becomes obsolete in the early decades of the Hellenistic period. Overall, these names are rare and therefore ‘marked’. In most cases they will have indicated a close relationship to the king. When such names are borne by officials – as they often, but not universally, are – they may emphasise their allegiance to the crown with a view towards masking or cancelling an outsider’s identity. We also see such names used for slaves and temple dependents; in these cases it is likely that the names were chosen by someone with authority over these people who had a close relationship to the crown. Names of this type are very rare among the members of the prestigious urban clans, especially among priests, and their occasional occurrence in such circles must be considered an exception with probably specific reasons that remain unknown. In other words, while a ‘Beamtenname’ on its own is not sufficient evidence to identify an official, it is very good grounds to assume that the name-bearer is not a priest. Therefore, we can say that Amurru-šarru-u ̇sur, chief administrator (šatammu) of the Amurru temple Ekurgal, is almost certainly an exception to the rule that the šatammu was usually chosen from the ranks of local priestly families.
[MH: I have not yet finished my research of the Assyrian period but still hold to my view that many so-called ‘temples’ of the earlier Mesopotamia are likely to have been agricultural estates governed by administrators with a shrine identifier on site. The problem may persist for later periods if the analysis of ancient governance units relies uncritically on then-given elite nomenclatures of ‘temples’, ‘priests’ or ‘divine kings’.]
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