A Year of Vengeance

Time, Narrative, and the Old Assyrian Trade

Edward Stratford

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501507182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Despite siginificant advances in annual chronology, the Old Assyrian trade fundamentally lacked a regime of time at the level of the merchant's commercial and personal activities. In this book, Stratford sets out to recapture time through narrative, drawing on the relationship between the two described by the philosopher Paul Ricouer. Investigating a possible case of revenge leads to weaving together more than a hundred mostly undated documents to form a narrative within the course of a single year of vengeance, including trade disruptions, illnesses, and commerce. This process demonstrates relationships between document and material context, and time and narrative. Along the way, Old Assyrian commercial time and its tempos become more clear, leading to descriptions of the scale of the trade and the nature of Old Assyrian archives as they have survived. Ultimately, the Assyrians involved appear as the earliest historical individuals in world history. The treatment of Šalim-a?um's apparent revenge comprises a practicuum in historical interpretation in the ancient world of interest to practitioners and theoreticians of both the ancient world and world history.

Part 1:Narrative and Time

A significant amount of the correspondence between Šalim-aḫum and Pūšu-kēn we can hold in our hands today arose within a single year, REL 82. This will be demonstrated by showing that the action expressed and referred to in these letters is continuous. The continuity of activity must fall within a primary temporal constraint of the trade: the space between when the snow-packed passes of the Taurus opened in the spring, around the beginning of April, and closed in the early winter, sometime in early December. This interval was ingrained into the strategies and decisions of every merchant involved in the trade because it so framed the transport between Assur and the Anatolian plateau. The shipping season, in fact, exhibited equal constraining force on the logic of merchants with other natural divisions of time: days, lunar phases, years. Thus several streams of Šalim-aḫum’s and Pūšu-kēn’s continuously developing activities during this season demand a new understanding of Old Assyrian commercial time. Šalim-aḫum’s overlapping shipments, sales, collections, and negotiations must have been accomplished at a tempo that is incrementally faster, but transformative in its recognition. This argument is one of drawing together particulars which, when their relationship is recognized, provide revision of some general trends.

In this way, the narrative, that is, the binding together of the activities witnessed in the documents, demands that these activities are both ordered and some sense of the intervals between them is expressed. As already represented in the anecdote of “Šalim-aḫum’s revenge,” these orders and intervals are expressed in the telling of the narrative, rather than by recourse to text editions. An exhaustive deduction for every temporal relation is not always presented in the narrative here. Broadly speaking, narrative history demands an economizing principle becasue if a full chain of deductive reasoning is offered at every turn, the narrative becomes an undigestible behemoth. Moreover, narrative is never completely deduction. Thus, the present effort is burdened by the fact that no comparable, pre-existing narrative of activity from the Old Assyrian period exists, demanding much more explanation than would be the case for, say, eighteenth-century France. In this volume, the economizing strategy is favored, many more individual explanations are left to the individual editions of documents in the second volume.

In this first part of the book, reconstructing Šalim-aḫum’s commercial activities focuses on an operation of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of time and narrative in reverse order. In addition to the lack of any continuing narrative in the Old Assyrian period, a continuous timeline populated by anything more than annual eponyms, month names, and occasionally week eponyms, is also missing. Thus, while the Old Assyrian calendar is increasingly clarified, a sense of Old Assyrian commercial time, the scale of time in which commercial activities were accomplished, has not yet been clarified to a sufficient degree. It becomes clear that such Old Assyrian time can only be revealed from these documents by recourse to arranging as many commercial activities in chronological order according to a judgement of causality. Most historians enjoy an uncomplicated chronology of material time, and so bridge the divide between phenomenological time and material time by recourse to a natural interweaving between two distinct but present forms of time. But in the Old Assyrian trade, we have not yet had a sense of material time at the level of commercial activity. In our case we must cross over the the aporetic divide from phenomenological time to material time on the bridge of narrative.

This chronological and causal ordering, this narrative reconstruction, constitutes a substantive move toward recovering Old Assyrian commercial time. Previous attempts to understand time have been limited to the attempt to uncover the markers of time themselves, such as the calendar, the annual eponym sequence, and other calendric sequences. However, such attempts try to recover time from outside its own flow. While the first chapter of this part works to substantiate the absolute chronology used here (Chapter 2), most chapters in this part work to uncover time by understanding the events that inextricably played out within that flow of time. Old Assyrian commercial time existed at the level of commercial activity, and, generally speaking, operated on the level of days, weeks and months rather than years.

The developments which allow us to bind together Šalim-aḫum’s letters with Pūšu-kēn will be described through the chapters of this part of the book. The first description will revolve around Ilabrat-bāni’s arrival in Kanesh, and the reasons for dating it to April 10th, which led to the statement that Šalim-aḫum learned of the problems on April 25th (Chapter 3). From that time forward, Šalim-aḫum’s letters were also concerned with the development of a separate caravan that arrived around the same time. Following the development of Šalim-aḫum’s sales and collections from the second caravan lays out a scale of time that shows these events all developed within the course of the shipping season of REL 82 (Chapter 4). Thereafter, it will be possible to connect a number of other developments which Šalim-aḫum simultaneously discussed with Pūšu-kēn, connections which both enrich the chronology of the year and corroborate the scale of time laid out by that second caravan. Ilabrat-bāni’s initial offense and later offer to buy goods from Šalim-aḫum was mentioned in letters relating to the collection of some of the claims on Šalim-aḫum’s second caravan (Chapter 5). And Šalim-aḫum also was seeking gold for a votive fund he managed. When Ilabrat-bāni offered to purchase goods from Šalim-aḫum, Šalim-aḫum sought a combined solution to both his problems (Chapter 6). Šalim-aḫum’s son Dān-Aššur brought the goods that Ilabrat-bāni bought, and tracking Dān-Aššur’s movements during the year further corroborate the continuity of Šalim-aḫum’s struggles with the votive fund and the collection of the second caravan with the raiding party on Ilabrat-bāni’s goods (Chapter 7). Finally, a review of the raiding party itself and its fallout thereafter show that concurrent activities saw both Pūšu-kēn and Šalim-aḫum planning for the end of the season (Chapter 8).

The narrative put forward here will undoubtedly be improved and refined as more attention is paid to the historical dimension of the Old Assyrian documents. But the basic premise, that the activity discussed here transpired within the course of a single year, is sound. This is important, as abstract arguments against the rates of travel set forth in Part 2 are not grounds to critique this more primary claim, at least so long as the Old Assyrian evidence offers no abstract corroborations. Only a particular argument, another narrative, in which the continuity of activity can be explained away in its particulars, has the force to destabilize this main narrative.

But the reader must make two accommodations in Part 1. First, the precision of these temporal markers exceeds anything yet considered within an anecdotal frame. But these descriptions are taken on from the beginning, though their appropriateness will be demonstrated over the course of this part of the book. One element is incorporated directly into the narrative in Part 1 because of its utility in the telling of the narrative, and because in this instance, it is so integral to the time which is realized during this year, that it cannot be postponed without making the narrative overly convoluted. This element is the most prominent temporal anchor for the anecdote ‘Šalim-aḫum’s revenge’ in the introduction, claiming that Ilabrat-bāni arrived in Kanesh in the second week of April. Šalim-aḫum received the report of that arrival, which prompted his first angry letter around 25th of April. This particular temporal anchor arises from an attempt to deduce a precise date for the months during the year of vengeance, here asserted to be 1891 BC. This argument is explicated in Chapter 3. The utility of this argument is to provide some reasonable beginning to the year. Our understanding of the particulars of the Old Assyrian calendar are still in motion, and some aspects of this explanation are more likely to be revised than the core argument of the book. But using this date allows the telling of the narrative to proceed with reference to the more familiar Julian calendar system.

Second, the narrative incorporates from the beginning three points that will become clear by the end of Part 1, but will not be reviewed at length until the second part of the book. One of these points is of interest to the continuity of Šalim-aḫum’s activities, particularly the activities related to his son Dān-Aššur and his activities and travels through the summer of the year of vengeance, during which an instance of the caravan hiatus (nabrītum) occurred. His activities are treated in Chapter 7, when sufficient context has become apparent to make those arguments meaningful. The word nabrītum has been interpreted in the past as being winter, but the narrative militates against that reading. Thus in Part 2 a direct discussion of the hiatus arises as a result of demonstrating the continuity of the narrative. Likewise, the tempo of activity that is embraced from the beginning is necessary to the narrative by virtue of ordering the developments reviewed in this first part of the book. The tempo of transport and communication are both apparently incrementally quicker than previously supposed. And in the reconstruction in this first part of the book, these tempos, that one could ship goods between Assur and Kanesh in a month, and send a letter in half that time, are incorporated directly into the narrative. Previous descriptions of these tempos have been based on abstract or comparative evidence, and fail in the face of the narrative of Šalim-aḫum’s commercial activities. But a direct discussion of each tempo in turn will not be taken up until the second part of the book.

Because it is necessary to recover Old Assyrian commercial time by recourse to this narrative reconstruction, several chapters also highlight points where the narrative reconstruction corrects distortions difficult to recognize in an anecdotal paradigm. For example, when discussing Šalim-aḫum’s ongoing commercial processes, it becomes clear that Šalim-aḫum could describe identical arrangements or assets in different ways. When discussing Šalim-aḫum’s attempt to procure gold for his votive fund, the high concentration of evidence on managing votive funds that relates specifically to Šalim-aḫum’s situation becomes apparent.

As a result, a work like this must proceed with sensitivity to these different conditions. Particularly in Part 1, it will be necessary to pause the narrative to articulate the constraints of interpretation brought on not only by narrow philological principles, but also by the increasing context for translating the documents, which context sometimes overrides what solution more narrow philological principles would suggest. In tandem with these types of pauses, there will be moments where the reasoning for the timing of the action, or the relation of the two documents, will need to be made clear, as these relationships have previously been missed. Despite the availability of these documents for some time, they have been left unexamined primarily because the kinds of operations performed here have not been engaged in favor of more immediate goals of lexicography and anecdotal frames. Effectively, it will be shown that once a connection between two documents is clear, the two documents cannot be read—or translated—without reference to the most consistent, reasonable understanding of the developing circumstances from which they came.

Chapter 3
Ilabrat-bāni’s Arrival

It was claimed in the introduction that Šalim-aḫum got angry in response to the letter revealing to him that Ilabrat-bāni had made his way out of Kanesh without penalty after his recent behavior, on or around the 25th of April, 1891 BC. This claim arises from the commercial transaction dates in the letter Šalim-aḫum received from his representatives that also included the short sequence of twenty characters: “Ilabrat-bāni took 6⅓ minas tin. He is not here.”76 Much of the letter’s 71 thin lines were concerned with the sale of Šalim-aḫum’s goods after they were cleared through customs. Šalim-aḫum’s representatives sold two lots of goods to two different merchants on credit, and communicated in their report to Šalim-aḫum the temporal terms on which the goods would be paid for: “Their (the two buyers) credit terms begin at the month ša kēn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Narrative and Time
• Part 2: Old Assyrian Time
• Part 3: Narrative and Context
• Part 4: The Material Implications of Old Assyrian Commercial Time
• Conclusion