Advancing the Society

The sixth chapter of The Age of Empires, as the chapter title entails, is all about the way society and the economy were run in the Assyria kingdom. I notice that there were a lot of similarities to how life was like in this empire to how life was like in the great city of Uruk, as illustrated in Uruk: The Great City by Mario Liverani.

For instance, the commodity of choice was barley. This makes sense because as we learned in Uruk: The Great City, barley could tolerate the salinity of soil and droughts, and had a relatively short growing season. For all of these reasons, barley was a suitable crop in Mesopotamia. However, in addition to barley, dates were also grown in Assyria, and were actually “more profitable than barley-growing” (154) because the heavy use of special farming equipment was unnecessary. This “advancement,” shall we say, of a new and more effective crop used in the Assyria kingdom is a good indicator that as time went on, farming techniques were adjusted to the changing environment.

Another similarity that I noticed between Uruk and Assyria is the position of the ‘great organizations,’ which included the palace and the sanctuaries. These powerful institutions still oversaw the agricultural and textile processes of their region, but in Assyria, it is believed that there was a system of “ladder-climbing” within the temple. In other words, the temple slaves, known as oblates, who were primarily used as the labor force of the empire, had the opportunity to rise up in the ranks and obtain a “real career within the temple administration” (146). We don’t see this opportunity to grow and “free” oneself from the bonds of slavery in Uruk. If you were a slave, that was that. You worked for the temple and received your payment through food rations. In Assyria, it was very possible to get oneself out of slavery, just as it was possible to be free of your debt if you lived in King Hammurabi’s Babylon. Thus, as time went on, we get to see how different societies adjusted to slavery, even allowing people an opportunity to get out of it.