Personal Rule Model with Market-Derived Bureaucracy Forms
Digging up Articles & Essays by Nicholas Postgate
Nicholas Postgate wrote:
EXHIBIT #1
“Middle Assyrian tablets: the instruments of bureaucracy”, in Altorientalische Forschungen 13 (1986) pp. 10-39.
… The transmission of authority
Public, private and the concept of responsibility:
… The examples … just mentioned exemplify the degree to which Middle Assyrian government was run along commercial lines, with administrative responsibilities being formulated according to patterns created for the regulation of private commerce. The business ethos, which had a long, healthy life already at Aššur, extended through all levels of government, and even the high offices of state and the provincial governorships were delegated to "houses". It is not difficult to offer an explanation for this: the royal house in Old Assyrian days had been but one among other family businesses, and these business houses had already established procedures for entrusting agents or subordinates with tasks involving commercial liability. In response to a sudden need for an administrative hierarchy capable of communicating decisions across a greatly enlarged Middle Assyrian kingdom, it was a natural step to adapt the commercial structure of the society of Aššur to the task of government. This, surely, is the origin of the elaborate system of written debt-notes and similar recorded obligations, which, although in legal guise, manifestly belong in our terms within the public sector.
It is at times difficult to know whether a particular document belongs to a public or a private transaction. The Ass. 14327 archive of Ašsur-aha-iddina’s family, for instance, contains both "private" and "public" documents, and we are entitled to wonder whether there was a clear demarcation between the two. Often we are forced to make a decision on this point by an intuitive assessment of the background as reflected by the document itself, and it is particularly hard to know whether a man's public obligations were technically distinguished in any way from his private debts. Nevertheless, the distinction between the public and private sector did exist, and was formally recognized: at least two useful indicators that a transaction was “public" were described over 50 years ago by P. Koschaker. First, the absence of witnesses is a clear indication that a contract is not a legally binding document … and in general one would expect such a document to belong outside the world of commerce, in a context where other prior and subsequent relationships made the formality of a witness and document unnecessary. Secondly, we have the phrase ša qāt, often found in place of the simple ša "belonging to" which introduces the creditor in a regular private contract. Meaning literally "of the hand of" this refers in our texts, as elsewhere, to things which are under the administrative charge of someone; the phrase introduces not the owner, but the administrator of the items in question.
If asked to translate "public sector" into Assyrian … the approximate meaning "sphere of administration" still seems correct …
EXHIBIT #2
"System and style in three Near Eastern bureaucracies” in S. Voutsaki & J.T. Killen (eds.), Economy and politics in the Mycenaean Palace States (Cambridge Philological Society. Supplementary Volume 27; 2001), pp. 181-194.
… The three systems have been selected not because there is any suggestion of a 'genetic' relationship between them and Minoan and Mycenaean practices, but precisely in order to underline their diversity in general, and in particular to illustrate the varying role of the written document within the different systems. They are the Ur III kingdom (2100-2000B.c.), the First Dynasty of Babylon (1800-1550 B.C.) and the Middle Assyrian kingdom in the 13th century B.C. …
Summary:
… [The] Middle Assyrian system resembles the Ur III, to the extent that administrative control reaches to the limits of the redistributive system … and that there is dense documentary coverage of the system. Nevertheless, the written formulation of administrative tasks as liabilities is strange to the earlier systems, and I have called this Middle Assyrian system “commercial” because it is my conviction that what we see is the redeployment in public administration of a mercantile ethos in which both commodities and tasks to be executed were regulated by legal instruments.
One essential aspect of a bureaucratic system is the placement of institutional boundaries. Thus, for instance, with a redistributive system the state organization could encompass all stages in the process of redistribution - that is to say the production, collection, storage, transport and ultimate delivery to end-user. The state could monitor all stages, or it could delegate, devolving responsibility to others. Written documentation will reflect these differences, but there are also differences in the way the written record is used, even where the processes were identical.
Where all processes took place within the confines of the state organization, one can see that with a tight hierarchy no bilateral documents were needed: unilateral documents could be kept as a source of information for future reference, but would not need to be kept where the administrative network was dense. An increase in bilateral documents perhaps could reflect a slackening of the bureaucratic mesh: as personal oversight became less automatic, a written testimony could substitute for it. As we have seen, at Drehem in the Ur III period, tablet sealing came in only under Shu-Sin, and this may have been a delayed response to the increasing distance between officials.
Of course the limit of the net is not a mere formality: those directly under the net are not their own masters, whereas an independent contractor would at least in theory have the freedom to choose what services to render and when, leaving him free to undertake other activities outside the institutional framework. Whether the relationship between a supplier and the institution was contractual or hierarchical will have depended on the choices of the institution backed by state power, but also on the nature of the source of supply: a shepherd by the nature of his work was not permanently under the observation of the bureaucrat, and the same applies to the merchants who brought materials in from abroad.
Perhaps the Ur III kings would have latched on to the Middle Assyrian system with glee. That they did not is probably because documentary coverage and the legally recognized format of documents had not developed to such a degree in the 3rd millennium private sector. It may not be too bold to suggest that the initiative in the application of written instruments to transactions shifted from the state sector to the private sector after the collapse of the Ur III system. In response to this, in Old Babylonian times the state began to borrow private administrative practice and to farm out much of its system to the private sector, reducing its administrative reach. The Middle Assyrian kings retained their reach, and merely borrowed and adapted the documentary ethos of the private sector.
EXHIBIT #3
"The invisible hierarchy: Assyrian military and civilian administration in the 8th and 7th centuries BC" [MGH: conference paper given in 1999, published in advance of the conference publication]
… By hierarchy, I mean both the personnel through whom the activities of government were administered, and the chain of authority and command which placed one official below or above another, thus obliging one person to carry out the instructions of another by virtue of their respective positions in the system. This is I hope not a controversial definition, but it is worth noting that it already uses some words, like "instruction" or "authority", which presuppose some aspects of the system worthy of further investigation.
Before we can understand how the hierarchy functioned, we have to remind ourselves what it was supposed to be doing. As the representative of the god Aššur, the king was in charge of the administration of the land of Aššur. The king was responsible for the prosperity of the land, and in the coronation ritual is explicitly required to enlarge it: "extend your land with your just sceptre” … Accordingly aspects of the government of the country of direct concern to the king will have included: defence of the realm, construction of public buildings and irrigation works, agricultural reform, judicial administration, and observance of ritual conformity.
If we ask how the king carried out these responsibilities, or from a different standpoint, how the establishment used the monarchy as an instrument of rule, we have to look both at the reality, and at the ideological vocabulary: how was the king's will converted into action by his subjects on the ground, and how was the chain of command described, i.e. what terminology was in use to describe the formal hierarchical structure, and what everyday vocabulary was applied to its functioning? … [Frustratingly] we have few statements about anything other than the actions of the king himself, and we are obliged to glean hints from the letters and administrative documents which were themselves components of the machinery of government.
Military and civilian:
The state sector must have comprised an extensive cadre of officials to whom the king's duties of state were delegated. Quite apart from military field officers, tax collectors and recruitment officers were needed, and the provincial governorates required civil administrators for town and countryside. The supply of clothing and other equipment for the army and public works, whether through the iškāru system or from some other source, will have required managers, and the activities of all these officials required monitoring and remunerating by someone (not all can have been allocated land holdings). One issue which needs to be addressed immediately is summed up by the words "military and civilian" in my title, which mask an ambiguity: are we looking at one hierarchy or two? Did the Assyrian government have a single system or two separate branches for the administration of military and civilian affairs? In the case of the Ur III kings P. Steinkeller has reconstructed a dual system comprising a "Civil Service", based on the traditional governing mechanisms in the different city-states, and a military command, presided over by the šagina/sakkanakkum, which was centrally run and co-existed with the civilian regime in each province. Hence the possibility that in the NeoAssyrian empire the military and civilian branches of the administration were separate is one that must be seriously considered. This is obviously a fundamental question which needs to be resolved before we can look in more detail at what the administrative system really consisted of, and at how it relates to the buildings in which we usually assume it operated.
Generally, we need to bear in mind that the bulk of the correspondence relating to government administration tends to be about military matters, or at least the spinoff from military matters. This is no doubt partly because of the importance and unpredictability of military events, requiring urgent and irregular actions and accordingly generating correspondence. Thus letters not infrequently deal with the disposition of deported populations. This is something which also features in archives of the Middle Assyrian period, and reasons are presumably that these were exceptional events which required ad hoc arrangements, and also events which crossed the boundary between one governor and another or between one governor and the central administration …
… For all these reasons, in discussing the administrative hierarchy of the state sector, we have to assume that province by province the individual governors were head of both civilian affairs and the military hierarchy. Beneath them, moving down the hierarchy, tasks must obviously have become more specialized, and no doubt most posts were carried out in either a civilian or a military environment. This does not necessarily mean that the titles of offices can always be confidently assigned to one or the other, and indeed, as just mentioned, the military hierarchical structure seems to have been replicated in civilian contexts.
The king's role:
There is plenty of evidence in the royal correspondence from the late 8th and 7th centuries that the kings played an integral role in the exercise of government, and that they played this role in person. It is noticeable that we not infrequently find letters from persons who have failed to see the king in person, although they plainly would have preferred this. Either they are simply too far away by virtue of the task they are carrying out, or they cannot secure an audience. Writing a letter is a second-best; an audience with the king is much better …
In the correspondence officials make it clear that they are prepared to take action without consulting the king. As in any efficient administration, they would know the limits of their responsibilities and powers, and would not have required separate authorization on each occasion, either by word of mouth or in writing. Nevertheless, to judge from the correspondence it often seems to have been a very "hands-on" system. The king interferes in a great variety of matters, and in various ways, and we frequently come across cases where, for one reason or another, the king's permission, influence or authority is sought …
[MGH omitted: examples given of types of kingly intervention and representation]
[MGH omitted: military & civil hierarchies are analyzed, including relative ‘status’]
My conclusions are:
that the Neo-Assyrian administration was not bureaucratic, and depended on a sense of institutional loyalty and personal interaction up and down the system.
that the administrative ethos was nevertheless well-developed, with well formulated concepts of responsibility and authority, and of appointment to and dismissal from, offices.
that the hierarchy of posts within the system is largely invisible to us because of the combination of the non-bureaucratic ethos, and the tantalizing usage of the phrase "Masters' House”.
EXHIBIT #4
“Documents in government under the Middle Assyrian kingdom” M. Brosius (ed.), Ancient archives and archival traditions: Concepts of record-keeping in the ancient world (Oxford University Press 2003), pp. 124-138
Types of Administrative Document
… A first fundamental point to be established about any administrative record is whether it is 'unilateral' or 'bilateral'. By this I mean, whether it is a record produced and kept by one person (or institution) for their own purposes, or one which records a transaction or other relationship between two parties and is acknowledged as valid by each side, and retained by one side (or sometimes both) as evidence for the resulting liability. Normally the bilateral nature of a document is implicit in the wording of the text, but by the late second millennium BC the acknowledgement of liability was usually also expressed physically on the document, with a seal impression. In this respect it resembles a private legal transaction.
One characteristic bilateral Middle Assyrian government document is the job contract. This resembles a private commercial debt-note, but without the witnesses required for a legally valid document. The obligation recorded may be simply to supply a commodity, to receive a commodity, and having worked with it to return a finished product, or to collect a commodity from a third party and deliver it. A time limit is usually prescribed, and the text states that once the commodity is delivered 'he may break his tablet'. This basic formula is infinitely adaptable, and so is applied to virtually any administrative transaction which involves one official (or privately contracted person) carrying out a prescribed task for another.
Unilateral documents are primarily identifiable by negative criteria, i.e. the absence of any sealing (or envelope), the lack of mention of one or both parties, the absence of any statement of liability, and the absence of any 'verb of transmission’… There is ample evidence from Aššur for unilateral administrative lists of expenditures and receipts, usually of foodstuffs and materials for craft production … On small memorandums the scribes often wrote 'written down so as not to forget’ …
… The Old Assyrian merchants talked of ‘uncovering the jars', which evidently meant taking out all the previous period’s records and compiling them into a statement of the current mutual obligations. In an efficient administration such procedures take place at regular intervals, and there is some evidence that government offices kept annual accounts …
Public vs. Private:
I have more than once suggested that Middle Assyrian administrative practice was borrowed from procedures used by the private commercial sector. This makes it difficult at times to determine whether the liabilities expressed are private and commercial, or public and administrative, or indeed, whether that distinction is universally valid. Various criteria can be used to identify the public and administrative transactions …. The consequence of the application of private commercial practices, with the ethos of an audit culture, must have been stultifying to government. Where not only the nature and quantity of commodities as they passed through the administrative machine, but also the administrators' abstract responsibilities in respect of them, are recorded in writing at every stage, rather than relying on the reciprocal expectations of an orally administered hierarchy, flexibility in response to change is lost and bureaucratic paralysis will tend to set in. This is not to deny that other aspects of the commercial tradition, such as company loyalty, may have had compensating advantages, but anyone looking in detail at the documentation required of a Middle Assyrian provincial governor can hardly doubt that he must have experienced some impatience with the 'paperwork'.
A reasonable explanation of the dominance in Assyria of the private transaction as a model for public administration would be that the commercial enterprises of the city of Assur were already highly sophisticated centuries before the inhabitants of the city found themselves called on to administer the newly acquired territories to the north and west. On the other hand, when we look at neighbouring Nuzi, the situation is very different. Here we do not see the network of administrative liabilities expressed in the same terms as commercial debts, nor are the administrative texts drawn up with the same regularity and formality as in Assyria. Although Nuzi had participated in the network of Old Assyrian trade-routes, it was not a major trading centre itself, and although it borrowed from Babylonian and Assyrian scribal practice, it is entirely possible that its administrative ethos was fundamentally different.
The Source:
Nicholas Postgate, The Land of Assur & the Yoke of Assur: Studies on Assyria 1971-2005, Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2007
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