Mechanisms of communication in an ancient empire: The correspondence between the king of Assyria and his magnates in the 8th century BC

How did ancient empires cohere? What roles did long-distance communication play in that coherence? How did long-distance communication work, structurally and socially? The aim of the project is to address these questions for the Assyrian Empire in the period between 721 and 705 BC, the reign of Sargon II when Assyria had been successfully transformed into the first large empire to exercise hegemony over the Old World core system. Assyria's success and stability owed much to innovations in administrative technology which afforded the control of a vast geographical horizon: Yet the mechanics of organization of the Assyrian Empire have found little attention beyond the study of the king's role. A shift of focus away from the monarch onto the second level of imperial control, i.e. the provincial governors to whom the king delegated governing power on a local level, will allow a new understanding of the set-up of the Assyrian empire to be reconstructed.
We will analyse the mechanisms of communication between the king and his immediate subordinates in two distinct and complementary ways. On the one hand, using the methods developed in the field of linguistic pragmatics, the different forms of the Assyrian language employed by the king and his subordinates, respectively, will be compared and contrasted, including a study of letter writing etiquette and of notions of politeness and appropriateness. On the other hand, we will apply a structural analysis of the second level of control, aiming to establish its level and nature in different parts of the empire by differentiating between the provinces inside Assyria's natural boundaries, the new provinces established by Sargon's immediate predecessors and his own additions. We will discuss the practicalities of and motives for long-distance communication, with an awareness for time and timing, as well as the strict conventions governing and complicating communication with the king.
Our research will be based on a thorough analysis of c. 1200 surviving letters of the correspondence of Sargon II, king of Assyria (r. 721-705 BC), with his governors and magnates. These letters are clay tablets inscribed with the cuneiform script. They were often carried over vast distances to reach their recipient; stored in the royal archives, they survived the destruction of the palaces in Nineveh and Nimrud at the end of the 7th century BC and are today kept in the British Museum.
We will convert a legacy database containing transliterations of Sargon's correspondence into an XML database using open, standards-based encoding, with a twofold purpose: Firstly, to serve as the project's research database, and ultimately, supplemented by translations, commentaries and bibliographies, to make the material freely accessible to the general public as a website that will be also used as a research tool by researchers.
The project team will comprise Dr Karen Radner, an expert on the Assyrian Empire, as the principal investigator and Dr Mikko Luukko, a specialist in the Neo-Assyrian language with a strong background in linguistics, as researcher. Both Radner and Luukko have been closely associated with the institution providing the legacy database, the Helsinki Corpus of Neo-Assyrian Texts project, since joining the project staff in 1997, as a post-doc researcher and a research assistant, respectively. The project partner, Professor Steve Tinney, is the driving force behind the standard-setting Cuneiform Digital Library consortium in the USA. A project student will investigate the historical geography of the Assyrian Empire during the reign of Sargon II.