August 2015
Vol. III, No. 8
Policemen in 1st millennium BC Babylonia
By: Reinhard Pirngruber
When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done,
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.
The Pirates of Penzance
There is always crime and sometimes there is punishment. But where do policemen come from?
The exceptionally abundant cuneiform documentation from Babylonia dating to the period of the Neo-Babylonian (626-539 BCE) and Achaemenid Empires (539-331 BCE) yields, among others, tens of thousands of legal and administrative tablets. In addition to the archives of the large temple households, mainly the Eanna temple in Uruk and the Ebabbar temple in Sippar, we also have the opportunity to study the business archives of individual families. These come from both the ranks of the traditional urban notables affiliated with the temples, and ‘new men’ such as the Egibi and Murašû families, who rose to wealth due to their entrepreneurial skills and their connections to the crown and its representatives.
But the appearance of new offices, that is, the institutionalization of tasks previously carried out on an ad hoc basis, is not confined to the highest echelons of the imperial administration. A particularly instructive case is the emergence of the 貹ū, which can be translated as a kind of ‘policeman.’
The activities of these officials are best attested in the Uruk Eanna temple archives, whereas for example in the Murašû archive, they only appear as witnesses to transactions. But 貹ūs are also documented throughout Babylonia, for example in the cities of Sippar, Babylon and Nippur.
A peculiar aspect of this office which deserves to be highlighted is the fact 貹ūs are not only encountered in the larger Babylonian cities but that they are often associated with small rural villages (possibly hamlets), places such as Šahrīnu, Nuhānu and Ālu-ša-admu. The pertinent texts offer thus glimpses into rural life that often lies well beyond the reach of our urban and temple based sources.
The available evidence suggests 貹ūs were charged with all sorts of on-site investigations regarding what we would define as petty crimes. For example, there are several references to theft of livestock from the herds of Ištar of Uruk, the city’s (and the Eanna temple’s) principal deity. A court protocol from Uruk describes in detail the proceedings regarding a cow that had gone missing: It fell upon Ea-kurbanni, 貹ū of the city of Uruk, to search the suspect’s house for evidence. He did indeed manage to procure a corpus delicti, a chunk of beef that was presented to the temple court.
The arrest of offenders was another task of the 貹ū. According to a particularly suggestive text, a certain Balātu, another 貹ū of Uruk, arrested a group of persons (mainly males but also two female singers) in front of a tavern because of a (possibly drunken) nighttime noise violation. The case was then again brought before the temple assembly, as was customary in first millennium BC Babylonia. Considering their activities, it is hardly a surprise that 貹ūs appear also as victims of criminal assault and even of murder.
Somewhat anachronistically, the 貹ūs may be defined as the executive branch of the Neo-Babylonian system of justice. It was their groundwork on which the judiciary, most frequently the temple courts, based their decisions. But their range of competences and their position vis-à-vis other state or temple officials are indicative of a rather low rank in the city’s bureaucratic hierarchy.
The precise relationship between them and the temple administration can be grasped only imperfectly with the sources at our disposal. Although 貹ūs were not regular part of the temple households, they are occasionally found carrying out work in the service of a temple, such as safeguarding property. According to one text (again from Uruk), the 貹ūs were in these instances personally liable for remuneration to the administration if theft occurred during their watch.
The fact that law enforcement was entrusted to a permanent office marks a telling difference with the Old Babylonian period, when policing tasks were often conferred upon individuals with a background in the military or recruited from the retinue of imperial magnates. Instead it seems to be that Babylonia in the first millennium BC was closer to Roman Egypt as regards the organization of the maintenance of public order, where rather low- ranking civic officials such as the nyktostrategoi and the eirenarchai are found in capacities similar to the Babylonian 貹ūs.
This development is indicative of the distinctiveness of Iron Age Babylonia compared to earlier periods. In that period, not only did empires stretch over significantly vaster areas than ever before. This development was also accompanied by a process of demographic growth and economic expansion, which in turn led to greater social stratification. Importantly, this process also entailed an unprecedented sophistication of and a much higher degree of specialization in the bureaucratic apparatuses of these empires, as reflected by the emergence of the office of 貹ū.
Reinhard Pirngruber is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna.