Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire

by Eckart Frahm

To grasp the enormous power the kings held, and the fear their demands instilled in their own officials, it is more instructive to look instead at some of the terse cuneiform letters they wrote. In one of them, Sargon II orders the governor of Ashur—not an unimportant man in the hierarchy of the state—to send seven hundred bales of straw and seven hundred bundles of reeds to Dur-Sharrukin. He declares that the materials must be at hand by the first day of the month of Kislimu, and then continues, “Should even one day pass by, you will die.” The statement conveys with somewhat shocking aphoristic brevity that in imperial Assyria, deadlines set by the king were quite literally what the term implies. Another letter is even more graphic. In it, Sargon asks the addressees to bring cavalry horses to a collection point by a specific time, only to add, “Whoever is late will be impaled in his own house, and his sons and daughters too will be slaughtered.”