Textiles in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Salvatore Gaspa

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501502699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book brings together our present-day knowledge about textile terminology in the Akkadian language of the first-millennium BC. In fact, the progress in the study of the Assyrian dialect and its grammar and lexicon has shown the increasing importance of studying the language as well as cataloging and analysing the terminology of material culture in the documentation of the first world empire. The book analyses the terms for raw materials, textile procedures, and textile end products consumed in first-millennium BC Assyria.
In addition, a new edition of a number of written records from Neo-Assyrian administrative archives completes the work. The book also contains a number of tables, a glossary with all the discussed terms, and a catalogue of illustrations. In light of the recent development of textile research in ancient languages, the book is aimed at providing scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies and ancient textile studies with a comprehensive work on the Assyrian textiles.

1Introduction

For many readers familiar with the classics, the description of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus given by Diodorus of Sicily (1st century BC) in his second book of the Library of History has been the primary, if not the only, source to know the everyday life in the Assyrian court. The Greek author describes Sardanapalus as wearing a female robe and as being primarily occupied in dealing with purple garments and wool.1 Through two of the most highly valued goods circulating in the textile trade of the time—purple articles of clothing and (dyed) wool—this deliberately disparaging imagery portrays the Assyrian king as an effeminate man who is devoted to activities more generally ascribed to female interests in the Greek world. To a Greek readership Sardanapalus simultaneously defines the unmatchable luxury of the Oriental court life and a negative model of political leadership. But in mentioning lavish garments and wool, this piece of information touches an important aspect of the Assyrian world of which only a brief glimpse reached the Greek world. In fact the manufacturing of textiles is one of the oldest activities emerging from the textual records of ancient Assyria, a region that roughly corresponds to present-day northern Iraq. It is interesting to observe that textile manufacture and trade in textiles have continued to be an important sector of the economy of the city of Mosul until modern times, as witnessed by the spread of the word for muslin in various languages to indicate a lightweight fabric, generally of cotton or wool, used for items of clothing as well as textiles for furniture. The Europeans first encountered this fabric in the northern Iraqi city.2 The history of textile manufacture in the region has its roots in the Old Assyrian period, when the first written sources in Assyrian begin to document the activity of the local merchants. According to economic documents of the 19th‒18th centuries BC found by the archaeologists in the Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia, textiles were a fundamental component of the goods exported by the Assyrian merchants to Anatolia, and textile manufacture played a vital role in the socio-economic development of the city of Assur and the surrounding region.3 Old Assyrian letters show that the merchants’ female relatives were largely responsible for producing the textiles necessary for trade. We have information about numerous varieties of textiles and the amount of wool needed for textile manufacture, as well as records attesting to the quality, finish and other important details about the end products.4 In addition to home-based production, many textiles exported to Anatolia from Assyria probably came from an institutional textile industry,5 although this is still disputed.6 It has been suggested that this industry, for which records date back to the Middle Assyrian period, probably began during the Old Assyrian period and that the expansion of the sector towards an export-oriented production came about because of the large amount of wool that the city of Assur received from local sheep-farmers. Either way, the local textile industry became an important factor for the economic development of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The wide variety of locally produced textiles destined to meet the needs of the ruling class and the Assyrian state were augmented by textiles imported from abroad which entered Assyria as luxury items. Assyrian expansion during the 1st millennium BC allowed the growing empire to open up new horizons in terms of trade. The circulation of goods (as raw materials as well as finished textile products) and artisans (textile specialists) within the imperial territory was favoured by the establishment of an efficient road system, an infrastructure which linked homeland cities with the provincial centres as well as rural villages of the remote periphery, and by a more widespread control of the administrative apparatus. Unfortunately, an idea of the wealth and the importance of this local textile industry can only be derived from epigraphic sources and visual art: the stone reliefs decorating the royal palaces and monuments as well as various artefacts dating back to the 1st millennium BC show us how the Assyrian garments look like. However, no physical remains of Assyrian textiles survive, except for some textile fragments found in the Neo-Assyrian sites of Nimrud and Assur. Concerning the royal graves of Nimrud, the fragments found there consist of finely executed and decorated linen fabrics which presumably clothed or shrouded the buried bodies or may have just been placed on top of them.7 These remnants were characterized by embroidered tassels and decorative elements (gold rosettes, stars, circles, triangles, carnelian beads) which had been sewn onto the garments.

This study aims to analyse the textiles documented in the written sources of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Textiles represent an important sector of the realia of ancient Mesopotamia, and their study may offer interesting insights into various aspects of its economy, society, labour organization, political imagery, religious ideas and ritual practices. In more fortunate cases, studies on textiles may rely on a variety of sources, combining data from cuneiform texts with details of material culture attested in archaeological evidence and iconography. Once confined to a few isolated studies conducted by female scholars, the research field of textile studies has now burgeoned into a challenging interdisciplinary sector in which new knowledge is created through a fruitful dialogue between historians, archaeologists and experts in textile techniques. This is confirmed by the increasing number of books and conference papers that have appeared in the field in the last decade, some of which specifically focus on the textiles documented in written and archaeological/iconographic evidence from the Ancient Near East.8 For the investigation of the Mesopotamian textiles important studies have been devoted in the past to the topic. In addition to single entries concerning specific aspects of textiles in the Ancient Near Eastern texts and material evidence appeared in encyclopaedias and lexica,9 a number of monographical works have been published. Important studies have been devoted to the terminology of the Mesopotamian textiles and their role in the economy and society in the light of documentary sectors of various historical periods, such as Waetzoldt’s work on the Neo-Sumerian textile industry,10 the investigation on textiles in Ugarit texts by Ribichini and Xella,11 Durand’s study on textiles documented in Mari archives,12 Veenhof’s analysis of the Old Assyrian trade in textiles13 and Zawadzki’s books on the Ebabbar’s archival documents dealing with production of textiles destined for divine statues.14 Other relevant studies over recent years have updated our knowledge about the textile technology of Ancient Near Eastern societies, such as Breniquet’s work on the early stages of textile industry in Mesopotamia15 and Völling’s in-depth investigation of textile techniques and tools in the light of present-day archaeological knowledge about the Ancient Near East textile manufacture.16 Today, textiles—whether attested in written sources, visual art or in archaeological evidence in the form of textile remains or imprints on various objects—have become another important source for the understanding of past civilizations under different viewpoints of historical research.

The main problem associated with understanding textile terms in ancient cuneiform sources is that these designations have been studied solely within the context of textual evidence, with no attempt to combine the data with other information from contemporary archaeological and iconographic evidence. The reason for this is that archaeological remains of textiles as well as any textile tools in perishable materials are too scanty, if not completely absent, in the Ancient Near East material evidence to confirm conclusions reached in philological and linguistic fields. In addition, philologists’ lack of basic knowledge about textile techniques, tools and materials, as well as the methodological difficulties in identifying textile terms with given items or technical procedures on the basis of etymology, represent an obstacle to the development of knowledge about this sector of Mesopotamian material culture.17 On the other hand, the application of observations pertaining to experimental archaeology in respect of ancient textile technologies or ethnographic research concerning present-day Near Eastern textile manufacture may inspire scholars of ancient textiles to formulate new interpretations about how textiles were made and treated in ancient societies. However, the lack of tangible remains prevents us from reaching any conclusive statement on the topic.

With these remarks in mind, the research presented in this book does not aim to discuss all aspects of the rich textile industry that flourished during the Neo-Assyrian Empire between the 9th and the 7th centuries BC exhaustively. Such comprehensive knowledge can only result from long-term and in-depth research on the topic. For the present, it is useful to equip scholars of Mesopotamian material culture with a study that touches the most significant aspects related to textiles in 1st-millennium BC Assyria, namely their management by the Empire’s central administration, the system of production and work organization in the Neo-Assyrian textile industry, the circulation of textiles in trade, the peculiarities relating to articles of clothing worn by the Assyrian elite and the royal army as well as those adorning the statues of the gods and their cult places. Such a study could also take advantage of a comparison with much richer data from 1st-millennium documents stemming from the Babylonian archives. The lexicon of the textile end products from Neo-Assyrian texts is also included in this study. All these topics will be covered in the following chapters by an in-depth analysis of written sources from the Neo-Assyrian period, and when possible with reference to archaeological and iconographic evidence about textiles. A thorough analysis of textiles in the visual art of palace reliefs and monuments of the Neo-Assyrian period is beyond the scope of the present book, but some observations expressed in this study may enrich the current discussion on the topic. Tables at the end of the book focus on specific data about administrative management of fibres and dyes, qualifications used in everyday bureaucratic language of Neo-Assyrian scribes and textiles in dowry lists. In another table the dress ornaments from the Nimrud queens’ tombs are described. In addition, a glossary of all the Neo-Assyrian textile terms and a re-edition of some of the Neo-Assyrian administrative texts dealing with textiles are given at the end of the book. The glossary contains not only terms in Neo-Assyrian dialect, but also Standard Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian terms that are documented in Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and Babylonian letters of the Assyrian kings’ correspondence.

This project on Neo-Assyrian textiles is timely in the light of the progress made in the publication of the Middle and Neo-Assyrian text corpus over recent decades.18 Although this study focuses on the evidence of 1st-millennium Assyrian textiles, the rich documentation available from Middle Assyrian archives cannot be ignored. The cultural continuity in terms of language and material culture in Assyria from the Middle to the Neo-Assyrian time becomes apparent if one looks at the lexicon of realia and techniques. Many designations for textile products and technical terms in use in the Neo-Assyrian period have been inherited from the 2nd millennium BC. In addition, a comparative study of data on textiles attested in the written sources from the Neo-Babylonian archives is crucial in many cases to obtain a more complete picture of production and use of 1st-millennium textiles in Assyria.

As far as ancient textiles are concerned, the statement made by Barber, the most eminent textile scholar—that words survive better than textiles—is substantially valid.19 This conclusion applies also to the Middle and Neo-Assyrian evidence, since we possess a great number of textile terms from cuneiform texts, but insufficient archaeological evidence about textiles and related techniques in Assyria for the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. This is due to the poor preservation conditions for textiles in the Mesopotamian region, which makes the recovery of textiles in archaeological contexts a rare event.20 But this situation is also determined by the fact that only in recent times has the high informational value of textile evidence (remains in the form of mineralised textiles as well as textile impressions on clay or other soft materials) been recognized as crucial to archaeological investigations.

In addition, since the large majority of textile-related 1st-millennium Assyrian texts originate from state archives, it is clear that the items in question represent only a small fraction of the textiles produced and circulating within Neo-Assyrian society. The textiles documented in the texts are generally luxurious textiles consumed by the palace elite or destined for cultic use in temples and no hint is made in the written sources about everyday articles of clothing or textiles used outside the socio-economic milieus controlled by the state. This situation (which also characterizes other periods of Mesopotamian history) is inevitably reflected by various studies that have appeared in recent years and which focus on textiles worn by rulers and members of the upper class.21

Another problem preventing us from reaching a full understanding of the textiles mentioned in the texts is that the authors of Assyrian texts—like those of any other text written in the ancient world—are upper-class male scribes employed by the state administration.22 To judge from the preserved texts, these scribes, employed in various branches of the state administration, show no interest in the more quotidian activities that textile craftsmen and their assistants performed in workshops for the needs of the ruling class. Their concerns are only for issues of state economy, politics and religion—all aspects that reflect the interests of the upper-class elite that ruled the Empire. This situation has a significant impact on the level of knowledge that we can obtain from the study o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The management of textiles in the Neo-Assyrian Empire: sources and administrative practices
• 3 Textile production and consumption in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
• 4 Textiles in the trade of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
• 5 Garments for kings, queens, soldiers and gods
• 6 Neo-Assyrian textiles: the lexicon
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendix A: Tables
• Appendix B: Neo-Assyrian administrative texts dealing with textiles
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index of selected textile terms
• Index of selected Akkadian words related to textiles