KAI RUFFING, KERSTIN DROSS-KRÜPE,
SEBASTIAN FINK, ROBERT ROLLINGER (EDS.)
SOCIETIES AT WAR
ÖSTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
PHILOSOPHISCH HISTORISCHE KLASSE
MELAMMU SYMPOSIA
HERAUSGEGEBEN VON
EDITED BY
ROBERT ROLLINGER und SIMONETTA PONCHIA
EDITORIAL BOARD:
ANN GUNTER (Evanston); JAAKKO HÄMEEN-ANTTILA
(Edinburgh); JOHANNES HAUBOLD (Princeton);
GIOVANNI BATTISTA LANFRANCHI (Padova);
KRZYSZTOF NAWOTKA (Wrocław); MARTTI NISSINEN (Helsinki);
BEATE PONGRATZ-LEISTEN (New York); KAI RUFFING (Kassel);
JOSEF WIESEHÖFER (Kiel)
BAND 10
KAI RUFFING, KERSTIN DROSS-KRÜPE,
SEBASTIAN FINK, ROBERT ROLLINGER (EDS.)
SOCIETIES AT WAR
Proceedings of the tenth Symposium of the Melammu Project
held in Kassel September 26-28 2016
and
Proceedings of the eight Symposium of the Melammu Project
held in Kiel November 11-15 2014
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Content
Acknowledgements ................................................................................. 9
10th Symposium “Societies at War”, Kassel 2016
Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink & Kai Ruffing
Societies at War – Introduction ........................................................... 11
Hannes D. Galter & Kai Ruffing
Introduction: “War and Numbers”...................................................... 15
Davide Nadali
Numbers Matter. On the Nature and Function of
Counting in Warfare in the Neo-Assyrian Period ............................. 21
Reinhold Bichler
Numbers in Herodotus ................................................................... 39
Patrick Reinard
“I do not think anyone in his senses would accept that!”
Remarks on Numbers of Fallen Soldiers in Roman
Historiography and commentarii ...................................................... 63
Giovanni B. Lanfranchi & Sabine Müller
Introduction: “War and Legitimacy” .................................................. 99
Salvatore Gaspa
The Assyrian King as a Warrior:
Legitimacy through War as a Religious and Political
Issue from Middle Assyrian to Neo-Assyrian Times ...................... 113
Simonetta Ponchia
Legitimation of War and Warriors in Literary Texts ................ 157
Daniel Ogden
The Treatment of Warfare in the Legendary
Traditions of Seleucus .................................................................. 177
Frances Pownall
Liberation Propaganda as a Legitimizing Principle in Warfare:
Dionysius I as an Antecedent to Philip and Alexander of Macedon.... 199
6
Content
Rocío Da Riva
Introduction: “War and Ritual” ........................................................ 219
Martin Lang
War and Ritual in Mesopotamia
and the Old Testament ................................................................. 229
Kai Trampedach
The Use of Divination in Ancient Greek Warfare ...................... 251
Wolfgang Havener
Tropaion. The Battlefield Trophy
in Ancient Greece and Rome .......................................................... 267
Oliver Stoll
Introduction: “War and Civilians” ................................................... 293
Josué J. Justel
“Run for your lives!” War and Refugees in the
Ancient Near East during the Late Bronze Age .............................. 307
Anna Maria Kaiser
Recruits and Deserters – How Wars affect the Civil
Administration in the Late Roman Empire ..................................... 331
General Session
Igor Kreimerman
Why Were Cities Destroyed in Times of War? A View from
the Southern Levant in the Third and Second Millennia BCE ............. 345
Geert De Breucker
The Babylonian Temple Communities and Greek
Culture in the Hellenistic Period ...................................................... 385
Christopher Baron
Communication in Alexander’s Empire .......................................... 409
Hilmar Klinkott
Mithridates VI and the Formation of an Empire ............................ 421
Content
7
8th Symposium “Iranian Worlds”, Kiel 2014
Marion-Isabell Hoffmann
Sasanian rock reliefs and the British embassy, 1810–1812 ............. 457
Jake Nabel
The Arsacids of Rome and Parthia’s
“Iranian Revival” in the First Century CE ..................................... 475
Sean Manning
War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some
Historiographical and Methodological Considerations........................ 495
Sabine Müller
The Winner Takes it All? Reflections on Persian Booty
and Persian Cultural Property in Wartime ........................................... 517
Susanne Rudnig-Zelt
“Who Created this Earth, Who Created Yonder Heaven,
Who Created Man” – The Understanding of Creation in
Old Persian Royal Inscriptions and the Old Testament ....................... 545
Ennio Biondi
Traces of Egyptian Culture in Plato’s Laws .................................... 561
Aleksandra Szalc
Indian Philosophers and Alexander the Great –
Reality and Myth ................................................................................ 575
Stéphanie Anthonioz & Nicolas Tenaillon
Greek Philosophy and the Wisdom of the East:
The Case of ‘Lady Wisdom’................................................................ 593
Jeremy A. Simmons
Paideia, God, and the Transformation of
Egyptian Lore in Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride .............................. 609
Alberto Bernabé
Greek Philosophy and the Wisdom of the East.
Response ............................................................................................. 639
Contributors ........................................................................................ 643
Index ................................................................................................... 651
Numbers Matter. On the Nature and Function of
Counting in Warfare in the Neo-Assyrian Period
Davide Nadali
Cinque … dieci … venti … trenta …
trentasei … quarantatré …
(Mozart / Da Ponte, Le nozze di Figaro, Act I, scene 1)
Introduction
Numbers and warfare are strictly bounded: in particular, war is a very
special situation where numbers acquire a very important meaning and
function. Even nowadays, when speaking of and analysing war, we are
inevitably attracted by numbers and, we could say, numbers precisely
dictate the reason and choice of war on the one hand, and the outcome
and implication of fighting on the other. In particular, after the battle is
over, a virtual fight of numbers begins comparing victories and losses,
survivors and fallen. It can be said that numbers substantiate war and war
is founded upon numbers: the present paper analyses the meaning and
function of numbers in the Assyrian sources trying to go beyond the toosimplistic conclusion of the use of high numbers because of mere aims of
propaganda. In the end, it cannot be totally denied that propaganda actually
had a significant and coercive influence in the creation and registration of
numerical data, but I think that the context (in addition to the content) of
use can explain the multifaceted meanings of numbers in the Assyrian
sources. In this respect, instead of simply considering the quantitative
nature of numbers – that is in fact the most direct and immediate aspect –
it is equally important to look at the qualitative implications of numbers
in written and visual Assyrian media, paying attention to the places where
those numbers were displayed and declared and the type of audience it
was supposed they were addressed to. Numbers deeply characterize the
nature of Assyrian sources: royal inscriptions and the daily letters sent
22
Davide Nadali
by the officials to the king are dotted with numbers and these do not
exclusively refer to war and the management of military campaigns.
Nevertheless, it is evident that warfare and the outcome of wars are one
of the main, if not the most important, topics of official written sources:
this is the reason why numbers in Assyrian sources are often questioned
as the different editions of the royal annals describe the same event
differently, recording different amounts of enemies killed or captured.1
At the same time, Assyrian war numbers are very selective as they always
refer to casualties and losses of the enemies, while they are silent (except
in one very special case) on the death and defeats of the Assyrian army.2
However, discrepant numbers are also found in sources that do not deal
with warfare, as for example the accounts of the building activities by the
Assyrian kings.3 In this case, numbers are treated differently by scholars:
no propaganda implications are inferred and the discrepancy of numbers
is explained as the result of the ongoing works of the Assyrian king who
precisely reports the progress of his activities year by year. If the numbers
of war (calculating the totals of cities destroyed, enemies killed, prisoners,
booty, weapons, and military men) change from one edition to another,
propaganda is not the only reason to be taken into consideration.
Coming back to war, numbers are used to describe the success of fighting and the outcomes of the war that has been fought – numbers are the
most useful and explicit tool to point out the military success of an army,
exalting the high percentage of enemies killed or captured, cities and places destroyed or conquered, the efficiency and quantity of soldiers and war
machines employed in the battles. Conversely, the same numbers can be
used to describe the situation suffered by civilians and the hard consequences of war on the civil population, material things, and environment:
this means that it depends on how one considers the Assyrian texts relating
1
2
3
See for example the list of variations provided and analysed by De Odorico, 1995:
45–74.
Vidal, 2013.
The accounts of the building activities of Sennacherib at Nineveh are particularly interesting and illustrative: several texts describe the works for the renovation of Nineveh
and the construction of Sennacherib’s palace. Numbers in this case refer to the ongoing
activities, giving for example the increasing dimensions of the palace (that reaches the
final size of 503 × 242 m in 694 BC) or the total of the city gates (14 in the annals
edition of 607–695 BC; 15 in 694 BC and finally 18 in 691 BC). See the edition of
Sennacherib’s texts dealing with building activities by Grayson / Novotny, 2012: 16–22.
See also Reade, 2000.
Numbers matter
23
to the quantities of prisoners and deported people; reading texts from an
Assyrian perspective, those numbers are the exaltation of the Assyrian success; looking at those texts as administrative documents (despite the possible exaggeration), those numbers give the reality that conquered people
might have suffered. This aspect is clear when the correspondence between
the Assyrian officials in the provinces and the king in the capital are taken
into account: the high numbers of prisoners of war are not at all a matter
of pride but they imply difficulties in managing the logistics (space and
enough food).4
Actually, even in recent wars, this is a quite natural and common
situation: numbers matter and the often exaggerated and misleading use
of numbers from both parties (winners and losers) consequently generates
a warfare of numbers – the amounts become the real content of the battles
and the declaration of numbers of people and things involved in and
affected by war often becomes the cause of a virtual warfare that does not
properly involve the use of weapons and men (proclamations, statements,
and reports from both sides).
In this respect, references to contemporary wars could be an interesting
starting point to reconsider the nature of numbers in ancient warfare:
indeed, it might even be considered a turning point in the analysis of
ancient wars and the way numbers were registered in ancient documents.
Numbers are the result of specific and precise operations, mathematical and
administrative operations on one hand, and political and communication
operations on the other: as a consequence, they are the result of registration
of data that, in war, mostly concern the quantity of soldiers, enemies killed
and captured, booty, animals, and devices employed.5
In the analysis of the data, different issues and persons have to be taken
into consideration:
1) who is counting;
2) what is counted;
3) why things and people are counted;
4) the use of positive and negative numbers as a balanced or unbalanced
comparison between win and loss;
5) where numbers were finally used, displayed, and announced.
The analysis of numbers should not be limited to the simple numerical
4
5
Fales, 2006; Nadali, 2014: 106–107; Dezsö, 2016: 85–91.
See the records collected by De Odorico, 1995.
24
Davide Nadali
value they express, but rather it should also point to the implication that
the registration of total amounts has: warfare is doubtless a favourite
field of research since numbers, as we said, cover several aspects of the
military life and army organization. For that reason, it is important that
the examination of how numbers matter in warfare must necessarily
pass through the consideration of the points mentioned above: it might
happen that not all points can be clearly and satisfactorily answered as it
principally depends on the nature of the sources at our disposal and the
way ancient scribes registered the numbers.
The Use of Numbers in the Assyrian Administration
Warfare in Assyria was a very common and frequent activity that
contributed to the growth of the empire, from the 9th to the 7th century
BC: a growth not only from the point of view of the conquest of new
territory, but also an economic development with high numbers of people
involved in the war as members of the Assyrian army, high numbers of
deportees that were employed in the civilian and military administration
of the empire for construction, labour, and specialized personnel.6 Assyria
was a well-organized administrative machine: written sources, letters
in particular, show how the territory was carefully controlled with the
dispatch of almost-daily letters to the Assyrian kings by the officials and
governors in the provinces of the empire as well as by a sophisticated
system of espionage.7 The act of registering numbers and events related
to war was of course very important and it necessarily involved many
levels of the administration: military dispatches and letters refer to the
organization of the movement of the troops, the collection of soldiers,
animals, and machines for the preparation of the military campaign and
of the single battle, and the management of prisoners of war in temporary
camps before they are moved to their final destinations.8
For what precisely concerns the registration of numbers, Assyrian
scribes and officials register different kinds of amounts on several written
documents: daily letters of the regular administration of the provinces of
the empire shed light on the mechanism of management of huge quantities
of people, animals and things (for example food supply or shelters that
6
7
8
De Odorico, 1995: 10; Nadali / Verderame, 2014.
Fales, 2001: 92–96; 2010: 56–57; Dezsö, 2014.
Postgate, 2000; Fales, 2006.
Numbers matter
25
are of course necessary in winter time and in inhospitable situations and
regions such as the mountains in Urartu).9
Because of the large quantity of letters (although we can still speak of
incomplete and partial documentation),10 we have many numbers at our
disposal: however, I will not precisely focus on the detailed analysis of
single numbers – the insightful study by Marco De Odorico is still the
reference book for the issues of how we have to consider and deal with
the categories of exact, round, and explicit high numbers of the Assyrian
sources.11 Being a consistent part of the written evidence of the Assyrians,
numbers are a fundamental contribution to the knowledge of the ancient
Assyrian society and the military organization in particular: the annals
and the official court texts explicitly created by the royal chancellery
follow a precise code and canon of expression and wording and give a
partial view of the numbers of the army and outcomes of the military
campaigns by the Assyrian king:12 that is, numbers are selected and they
are reported quite quickly and roughly, giving exact (estimated), usually
quite high, amounts that should however not sound too unrealistic and
obviously inflated.13 At the same time, even for letters, we can speak of
the partiality of the information they provide: since they refer to specific
episodes that occurred in recent days or even hours, the data they register
and refer to the king are probably too precise and limited to the most
recent events.14 The numbers they give can of course change and it is only
the entire corpus of a correspondence that can precisely give the content
of the message and the total numbers of people and things involved. So,
9
10
11
12
13
14
SAA I 11, 219; SAA V 156; Fales, 2006: 59; Nadali, 2014; Nadali / Verderame, 2014: 557.
The use of perishable materials (leather, papyrus, wax-covered tablets) to write documents in Aramaic certainly caused the loss of several letters of the correspondence, in
particular, of the 7th century BC (Parpola, 1981: 122–123; Radner, 2014: 85).
De Odorico, 1995: 4–8.
On the code of the Assyrian official inscriptions (namely royal inscriptions) and its
implications in deciphering and translating, see Cogan / Tadmor, 1997; Grayson, 1981;
Levine, 1981; Liverani, 1973; Tadmor, 1981; 1997; finally see the overall evaluation of
recent trends in assyriological and historical studies of the Assyrian royal inscriptions
by Fales, 1999–2001.
Scribes prefer to use numbers such as 100,225 or 200,150 instead of the exact round
digits like 100,000 or 200,000 (De Odorico, 1995: 171–172).
This also depends on the fragmentary condition of letters as well as on the fact that
letters are usually undated (Parpola, 1981: 125); Dezsö, 2006a: 93.
26
Davide Nadali
together with the points previously discussed, we should also take into
consideration when numbers have been registered: the question of time
is fundamental because the progression of events necessarily involves a
change and an increase of numbers.15 During the military campaigns it
is reasonable to think that, while the army is involved in the fight, daily
dispatches continuously bring new information to the king, including
updates on the numbers of cities destroyed and conquered, enemies
killed and captured, total amount of booty collected, and losses the army
might have suffered. While royal inscriptions give the final total amount
(either exact or apparently exaggerated), letters go into the details of
the progression of numbers and this is also true for the composition of
the army with the quantity of soldiers for each unit: in particular, letters
describe the quantity of soldiers that are physically and effectively present
on the spot in front of the officials who are writing the document for the
king. This is quite clear in the letter ND 2631 = NL 89:16 in fact, the writer,
after giving the total of the king’s men (1,430), clarifies that the rest of
the troops – it is impossible to know the quantity of this remainder – is
delayed but on its way with the major-domo.17
The chronology of numbers gives the sequence of events and can explain
the changes we encounter in the sources: this seems quite reasonable and
normal when letters are taken into consideration. Because of the temporary
nature of the information they deliver, it is obvious that numbers can be
corrected and updated (either augmented or diminished) in later messages.
In this respect, the simplistic conclusion that numbers have been expressly
falsified should be denied or at least revaluated: as rightly pointed out by
De Odorico, “as for the ‘corrections’ (that is alterations) at the level of
digits, […] we saw that in most cases they are probably due to oversights
or copying errors and not to the intention of inflating the numbers”.18
It seems that we tend to give simplistic and quick interpretations to the
mechanisms of how ancient people dealt with numbers, in particular when
numbers refer to military events that boost the glory of the winners. This
situation often occurs with the Assyrians because their imperial attitude
is judged to convey a forced view and representation of the reality by
15
16
17
18
De Odorico, 1995: 76, 173.
SAA V 215; Saggs, 2001: 128–130. For comments and studies of the document, see also
Fales, 1990 and Postgate, 2000.
Fales, 1990: 33.
De Odorico, 1995: 119.
Numbers matter
27
the use of propaganda. Exaggerated and high numbers would then be the
result of an alteration of the reality: this idea has also been applied when,
on the contrary, sources minimize numbers, as it happens in the Letter
to the God Ashur by the king of Sargon II where the loss of the Assyrian
army is schematically and laconically reported as follows: “1 charioteer, 2
horsemen and 3 infantrymen were killed”.19
The idea of propaganda in Assyrian sources has largely influenced
the way scholars approached Assyrian documents;20 more recently, that
propagandistic vision has been attenuated or at least reconsidered in the
light of new ways of studying the Assyrian written and visual evidence
(taking for example into account the nature of the ancient audience and
its role).21 Can numbers in warfare be a proof of Assyrian propaganda?
Did the Assyrians rely upon numbers to build their power and control
over territories and people? I think we cannot totally deny the possibility
that Assyrian scribes and officials used numbers to describe a situation
that indeed did not perfectly correspond to reality; rather, numbers were
specifically used to create an invented reality, actually something similar
to nowadays in the law of market economy, economic growth, and
outcomes of wars and polls. At the same time, however, the claim to the
use of propaganda has been extensively used to explain and justify every
discrepancy in the numbers provided by the Assyrians in their sources.
It must be pointed out that, in spite of the various written sources of the
Assyrian period, we still lack part of the ancient documentation and, more
importantly, we do not have enough (actually we do not have any at all
in some instances) non-Assyrian sources that can balance the information
and facts from the Assyrian point of view.
Looking at the majority of written texts in ancient Mesopotamia, it can
be observed that numbers are the most important if not the main topic and
content of texts; the first examples of cuneiform texts are administrative
documents and writing had a special use and function in registering and
managing the administration of the ancient Mesopotamian cities;22 finally,
19
20
21
22
Translation by Fales, 2017. For another recent edition and translation of the letter, see
Foster, 2005: 790–813. For comments on the composition of the text, see Fales, 1991.
Garelli, 1979; Liverani, 1979; Reade, 1979.
Tadmor, 1997; Liverani, 2010; Sano, 2016.
As shown by the long lasting tradition (already attested in the archaic cuneiform documents) of filling out lexical lists of people, objects, professions, and words. For an overview of the history of lexical cuneiform lists in ancient Mesopotamia, see Veldhuis, 2014.
28
Davide Nadali
it can even be asserted that writing was invented to serve that purpose.
The function of writing, at least for an administrative use, was to record
and register numbers of people (professions), animals, and things, in
order to have the exact situation of people and goods at the disposal of
the temple, palace, and city in general: if so, it seems there was no need to
invent numbers as totals were calculated to mirror the reality rather than
to envisage sums of employees of the state. Invention and exaggeration
in the calculation of the administration of an institution would sound
extremely illogical. It is however true that the real intention of even the
administrative documents can escape us: exaggeration of numbers might
in fact reflect the ideal an institution aspires to.
However, when referring to the Assyrians, the idea of propaganda
heavily affected the analysis of numbers, since it has been principally
based on the existence of hyperbolic numbers (numbers of soldiers,
numbers of captives, enemies killed, booty) and the nonexistence of any
problem faced by the Assyrians in war: Assyrian bas-reliefs represent no
Assyrian soldier dead or suffering at the hands of his enemy. Even when
written sources refer to the loss of the Assyrian army, numbers of dead
soldiers are so limited and scanty that they sound unreal if compared to
the huge numbers of troops. So, the letter to the god Ashur by Sargon II on
his eight military campaign simply reports that “1 charioteer, 2 horsemen
and 3 infantrymen were killed”: 6 soldiers dead from an army totalling
thousands. Indeed, the relationship between the number of men and
number of dead soldiers is unbalanced: it appears that scribes, in a special
literary work such as the letter to the god Ashur, used a coded phraseology
where the reference to the dead men of the Assyrian army was simply
instrumental and generic.23 Since the letter was probably read publicly,
Mario Liverani asks whether “families, whose sons had not come back
home from the expedition, […] perhaps imagined that their own missing
person was one of the few mentioned by the king”:24 the nature of the
document must be taken into consideration and the use of such wording
23
24
On the coded phraseology of the letter that shows the skilful use of rhetoric with variances in motif, see Fales, 1991. That the reference to dead soldiers in the ratio 3–2–1
might correspond to a stylistic “way of saying” rather than to a mystification of the
numbers of casualties seems to be proved by the later incomplete draft for Esarhaddon’s
letter to Ashur that records exactly the same amount of losses (Postgate, 2000: 105, n.
86; Fales, 2017: 215).
Liverani, 2010: 230. See also Foster, 2005: 812, n. 2 and lastly Fales, 2017: 215.
Numbers matter
29
with the mention of only six dead Assyrian army soldiers was therefore
part of a common ceremonial idiom.
Although distant in time, it might be interesting to compare the
registration of the casualties of the Assyrian army with some documents of
the third millennium BC from Ebla, in Syria, that deal with the registration
of dead soldiers: the nature of the texts from Ebla is totally different from
the Assyrian letter to Ashur. They are in fact purely administrative texts:
in particular, three interesting texts related to the wars waged by Ebla
report the loss of the Eblaite army;25 text TM.75.G.1698 from the great
main archive L.2769 registers the loss of 20,309 men, a huge amount that
must necessarily make us reflect on the composition and size of the army
of Ebla in the third millennium BC.26 Due to the administrative function
of the texts of Ebla, the number of dead soldiers must be considered true,
as it would be illogical to register an invented so high number of losses of
its own army for celebratory purposes.
The content of the Assyrian and Eblaite texts is similar (at least
concerning the reference to the losses of the army), but the context is
completely different. Going through the points previously quoted:
1) Who is counting? Assyrians (or the Assyrian king), on the one hand,
and the scribes of the Ebla administration, on the other.
2) What is counted? Both are registering the losses of their own army.
3) Why are they registering this kind of data? The Assyrian scribes
probably used a coded poetic language; the importance was the
reference to the losses rather than the reality of numbers (the real
deaths the Assyrian army suffered); Eblaite administration carefully
registered all data about the military campaign and the deaths of
soldiers was part of the information that did not need to be hidden
nor falsified.
4) Where was the information stored? The context of use of the
documents marks the difference and therefore implies a different
audience: Ebla texts have been found in the Royal Palace and were
therefore official documents stored in the palace archives;27 the data
were then used to draw up a final account at the end of the military
25
26
27
Archi, 2009: 29–32.
Based in fact on the numbers of losses registered in these texts, Archi suggests that the
army of Ebla might have been made of a total of at least 44,000 men (2009: 33).
Matthiae, 1986; 2008: 63–77.
30
Davide Nadali
campaign confronting the numbers of outcomes, incomes, victories,
and losses; as the army of Ebla was made of Eblaite soldiers and men
supplied by the allied cities,28 the account of losses was probably
used to administrate the relationships with allies. Documents with
the registration of the numbers of the losses were read and used by
internal scribes and officials and information was also shared with
the partners of Ebla; moreover, the information was also fundamental
to reorganizing the army with a new levy and request of soldiers for
future campaigns. On the contrary, the letter to the god Ashur was
a very special literary work that was not used for administrative
purposes: it was a direct dialogue and speech of the Assyrian king
with the national god Ashur and information was therefore carefully
chosen. The letter was also presented to the people of the city
Ashur who could therefore witness the special relationship between
the god Ashur and the Assyrian king; therefore, the outcomes of
Sargon’s military campaign against Urartu were also shared with
the citizens of Ashur and all of the city was called to feel part of a
larger Assyrian community that also remembered those who died in
the battle. The idea that the letter was read aloud is only conjectural,
but the choice of writing a letter seems to point to the importance of
a direct communication between the king and the national god and
between the king and his people. Finally, the reference to the loss
of 6 soldiers could be true, partially true, or even false: this means
that the Assyrian army might have lost more than 6 men or it did not
suffer any losses at all: the content was instrumental for the special
use of the document and the context when the letter was recited,
publicly or not.
↖
↙
Who is counting?
content vs context
Why are data registered?
28
↗
↘
What is counted?
Where are data stored?
On the composition and levy of men in the army of Ebla, see Biga, 2008: 325–326;
Archi, 2009: 20–27.
Numbers matter
31
Conclusion
Scholars have usually labelled the use of numbers in Assyrian sources
as suspicious, explaining discrepancies and alterations by appealing to
the deceptive Assyrian propaganda and emphasizing the real meaning of
digits in the inscriptions. Recent studies proved that a careful analysis of
numbers (putting together the information of the daily sources of the letter
and the official royal inscriptions)29 shows that the high numbers claimed
by the Assyrian kings are not so unreal or distant from the evaluation we
can make;30 surely, it depends on how we evaluate those numbers, and on
29
30
See for example the studies by Fales, 1990; see also the study by Dezsö (2006b) who
pointed out the importance of the pictorial evidence, going beyond the idea that Assyrian bas-reliefs are too schematic and repetitive to show aspects of real Assyrian daily
life. In particular, Dezsö analyses the pictorial evidence from the reign of Sargon II:
together with the written evidence (so, not in opposition), sculptures can eventually
reveal interesting aspects of how the army appears (the physical representation of the
quantities of soldiers, the types of weapons, amour, machines,) as well as the situation
(open field battle or siege) where the army operates. In this respect, Dezsö rightly observes: “the military scenes on the sculptures, however, give a lot of information which
is missing from the cuneiform sources” (2006b: 89). It is not a question of establishing
a classification of importance, but rather of integrating data: in this respect, although
indirectly, representations of the Assyrian army and wars also refer to numbers, with the
depiction of ranks of soldiers, rows of prisoners, and the objects of booty pillaged.
For Sargon’s army, see Dalley / Postgate, 1984: 28–47 and Dezsö, 2006a. The number
of 120,000 men given by Shalmaneser III during his 14th campaign against the Syrian
coalition has for example always been targeted as suspicious and unrealistic: that is
120,000 men is really a too-high and exaggerated number; however, the digit could in
fact be interpreted as a round high number used by the Assyrian scribes to comprehend
the totality of the soldiers the Assyrian army could have had. As said by De Odorico
(1995: 111), “the number may have represented the theoretical or conventional size
of the Assyrian army”. In this respect, the datum of 120,000 is not properly a wrong
number: it refers to the highest possible size of the Assyrian army rather than to the real
number of forces on the battlefield in Shalmaneser’s 14th campaign (Liverani, 2004:
215–216; Fales, 2010: 98). Taking into consideration another source of Shalmaneser III
that gives the amount of cavalrymen (5,242) and chariots (2,001 = 6,003 men if we consider that each chariot carries up to three soldiers), Fales integrates the missing number
of infantrymen (78,630): he concludes that the total men of Shalmaneser’s army would
encompass about 90,000 soldiers that “ce n’est pas au fond pas si éloigné du chiffre
de 120,000 évoqué plus haut” (Fales, 2010: 99). In conclusion, 120,000 men does not
represent the total of the forces employed by Shalmaneser in the battle of Qarqar in 853
BC: it is a theoretical number that encompasses the standing army and the additional
32
Davide Nadali
what we want to read in those accounts. At the same time, and conversely,
we should first consider which message the Assyrian king wanted to convey
and to whom this message was principally and specifically addressed.
Although data on Assyrian numbers are quite numerous, we are still
missing part of the documents (i.e. they have not yet been found) and
we should also take into account the possibility that some texts might
have been purposely destroyed. Once numbers were registered in the final
accounts, temporary notes were discarded; so royal inscriptions and the
different versions of the annals contained revised (increased or decreased)
numbers that were the result of the recounting of notes and the integration
of new information. In the end, internal and external numbers can be
appropriately distinguished: on one hand, there were numbers that were
used by the administration and the official of the state only; while on the
other, there were numbers that could be (or even had to be) communicated
outward. In this process of external communication, propaganda might
have played a role, but it does not completely explain the way that the
Assyrians dealt with the numbers in their documents related to warfare:
surely, some numbers might have been adapted and suitably changed.
How is it possible to state that numbers have been modified from one
inscription to another? Indeed, the Assyrians themselves left the traces of
their changes because they did not cancel the previous versions of royal
inscriptions that reported the different numbers for the same event: if
their propaganda was so efficient, how is it possible that they failed in
this? Maybe what modern scholars labelled as propaganda was on the
contrary the demonstration of the Assyrian king, in front the gods and his
people, that he was able to rule even the numbers; on the other hand, this
situation more plausibly describes a complex reality where numbers were
sometimes given in round and high totals and were then recalculated on
the basis of new incoming data.
men supplied by Assyrian allies. The Assyrian standing army (kiṣir šarrūti) during the
Sargonid time probably had 35,000 men: other units were then added arriving at a total
of 100,000 men at most (forming up the ṣāb šarri, the king’s troops) (Henshaw, 1969:
3–5; De Odorico, 1995: 111; Postgate, 2000: 107; Fales, 2010: 140–141). At the same
time, if we consider the special occasion (Shalmaneser’s 14th campaign, Liverani, 2004:
215) for such a high levy, maybe the number does not sound so illogical and unrealistic:
actually, if Archi’s assumption is correct (2009: 33), Ebla had an army of about 40,000
men in the third millennium BC!
Numbers matter
33
Numbers, however, were not only recorded in written sources: what
happened when numbers needed to be represented? How were the written
numbers of cuneiform sources translated into the visual numbers of
pictures?31 It seems that pictures of soldiers and enemies on the Assyrian
bas-reliefs in the rooms of the royal palaces work to multiply the presence
and the quantity of people. Again, the analytical points (who, what, why,
and where) are also valid for pictures: who is depicting numbers? What
numbers are depicted? Why are numbers depicted? And finally, where were
numbers displayed? It is true that no bas-relief shows an Assyrian soldier
dying, so are we still deceived by propaganda? I think that the perspective
we use to look at the Assyrian bas-reliefs nowadays is misleading: indeed,
we mostly rely upon photos of pictures and enlarged photos of the reliefs
that show even the smallest details.32 In this way, we dismiss the general
view of the sculptures and the context in which they were placed and
displayed. Can we really say that Assyrian pictures were ‘displayed’?
Ancient Assyrian palaces were not museums. Sculptures surely celebrated
the deeds of the Assyrian kings, but they were not works of art to be
contemplated, at least not in our contemporary understanding. I think
that looking from a distance at the long rows of soldiers, represented
two by two so as to multiply the length of the formation, and the long
processions of prisoners, sometimes on several registers, really gave the
effect of abundance;33 conversely, in the close-up of the couple of counting
scribes,34 the abundance or what we could label as the visual rhetoric of
numbers can be precisely perceived in the obsessive registration of the
booty (prisoners, objects, severed heads). So the multiplication of figures,
one next to the other and one after the other, was not a simple way to fill
the gap and to compulsively occupy the entire surface of the slabs (thus
reducing some pictures to simple filling motifs); nor it was a mechanical
copy and paste of a model to render the numbers visually.
31
32
33
34
If they were translated into pictures: Assyrian bas-reliefs are in a certain way a reinterpretation of the data that pass through a process of selection of what must/must not
and can/cannot be represented (Nadali, 2016).
On the visual effect of distortion and alteration of the perception as caused by photography, specifically detailed photos of partial portions of the bas-reliefs, see Winter,
2000: 51–54.
Bagg, 2016: 66.
If they are both scribes: see Madhloom, 1970: 121–122; Reade, 2012.
34
Davide Nadali
If the numbers of the Assyrian state (the soldiers of the army, the
officials and members of the court, the prisoners, the booty, and the
cities conquered) had also to be expressed visually, this choice probably
depended on the intentional creation of “the visual rhetoric of abundance”,35
a communicative process and strategy that envisaged the centrality of the
Assyrian king as the focal element that generates, attracts, and rules high
numbers and quantities.
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