As a distinct category of onomastics, the Beamtenname is defined by its containing of a reference to the name-bearer’s superior, normally the king (Reference EdzardEdzard 1998–2001, 109–10; Reference StreckStreck 2001). In the context of the onomastics of first millennium BCE Babylonia, this means, for all intents and purposes, names that contain the element šarru ‘king’. Names containing as an element a king’s entire name – such as the early Old Babylonian name Išbi-Erra-dannam-nādā – were no longer in use. This chapter will first investigate the typology of šarru-names. Then we will address the question, based on prosopography, how such typological ‘Beamtennamen’ are actually represented among the names of officials, and to which degree names of this type are indicative of a specific socio-economic and administrative collocation of the name-bearers.
Typology of Names Containing the Element šarru ‘King’
Semantically, a larger group of names expressing a wish or blessing for the king has to be distinguished from a much smaller group in which the king is essentially a stand-in for a theophoric element in that a wish is addressed to him. In the following discussion, references for names whose bearers were demonstrably royal officials will be flagged by adding the person’s title or function. The absence of such a flag, however, does not necessarily mean that the person in question did not have a background in the royal administration; it only means that relevant information is lacking.
Wishes and Blessings for the King
By far the most šarru-names have the pattern DN-šarru-uṣur ‘DN, guard the king’. Essentially the whole range of theophoric elements attested in the onomasticon appears in these names, from rare and mostly local deitiesFootnote 1 to the ‘great’ gods of the dominant Babylon theology. Of the latter gods, Nabû is the most frequently attested in šarru-names, with Bēl second. Temple names can take the place of the theophoric element;Footnote 2 infrequently, a variant with ina ‘in’ is found (Ina-Esagil-šarru-uṣur; BM 29311). Occasionally, the theophoric element reveals the non-Babylonian origin of the name-bearer. For instance, Yāḫû-šarru-uṣur was a Judean (CUSAS 28 2–4) and Milkūmu-šarru-uṣur probably an Ammonite (VS 3 53). Very rarely, a ‘house’ or ‘clan’ appears in the first place: the name of governor Bīt-Irˀanni-šarru-uṣur refers to the Irˀanni clan (Reference WunschWunsch 1993 no. 169).
Variants of the DN-šarru-uṣur type include:
Instead of an imperative, the verbal form can come in the preterite:
| DN-šarru-ibni | ‘DN has created the king’ (OECT 10 362) |
| DN-šarru-ukīn | ‘DN has established the king’ (GC 2 298) |
| DN-šarru-utēr | ‘DN has restored the king’ (BM 114616) |
| DN-balāṭ-šarri-iqbi | ‘DN ordained the king’s life’ (TCL 13 227; a mašennu official) |
Rare names expressing a wish or blessing for the king are:
| DN-rāˀim-šarri | ‘DN loves the king’ (TCL 9 103) |
| DN-šul(l)um-šarri | ‘DN, (establish) the well-being of the king’ (YOS 6 11) |
| DN-itti-šarri | ‘DN is with the king’ (CTMMA 3 38) |
| Itti-DN-šarru-lūmur | ‘Let me see the king with the help of DN’Footnote 3 |
Finally, Šarru-lū-dari ‘May the king endure’, attested as the name of a qīpu official (CTMMA 4 136), expresses a wish without explicitly addressing a divinity.
Instead of the king, ‘kingdom’ (šarrūtu) can appear in names – for instance, in DN-kīn-šarrūssu ‘DN, establish his kingdom’, DN-šarrūssu-ukīn ‘DN established his kingdom’, and Tīrik-šarrūssu ‘Let his kingdom be long-lasting’.Footnote 4
Apart from the king, the crown prince is the only other member of the royal family who appears in names: DN-mār-šarri-uṣur ‘DN, guard the crown prince’ (BM 103477; a vice governor of the Sealand).
This name type falls out of use at the end of the fourth or very early in the third century;Footnote 5 in fact, the later Hellenistic onomasticon does not contain any šarru-names at all;Footnote 6 see the following section.
Blessings from the King
The second category of names – more varied than the first, but with far fewer attestations – focuses on the king not as the recipient of divine blessings implicitly requested by the bearer of the name, but as a fount of blessings in his own right. Functionally, the king replaces a divinity in such names. This is most explicit in the name Šarru-ilūˀaFootnote 7 ‘The king is my god’ (YOS 3 159; a rab musaḫḫirī official), but the fact also evinces clearly from the following name pairs.Footnote 8
Also in this type of name, the crown prince makes an appearance: Mār-šarri-ilūˀa ‘The crown prince is my god’ (YOS 7 195). Finally, it should be noted that the only Babylonian family name that invokes the king, LUGAL-A.RA.ZU(-ú), may belong to this name type. Its exact reading and interpretation are uncertain (Reference 92Wunsch, Krebernik and NeumannWunsch 2014, 310), but A.RA.ZU should stand for taṣlītu ‘prayer’ or for a form of ṣullû ‘to pray’.
None of the names in this second group, which cast the king in a (quasi-)divine role, comes from a source that post-dates 484 BCE (i.e., the major break in the continuity of Late Babylonian history). The first group, which invokes divine support for the king, on the other hand, continues (though with less frequency) beyond 484 BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. To some degree, these are proxy data for the development of Babylonian attitudes towards kingship. For the long sixth century, the continuing relevance of traditional sacralised kingship cannot be doubted. Thereafter, it was no longer common to consider the king on a par with the gods. The pertinent names are no longer attested, even among the numerous Babylonians who had close ties to the royal administration and who occasionally would still bear names invoking the gods’ protection for the king. In the Hellenistic period, even this latter name type disappeared, probably because of the disappearance (from our view, at least) of royal officials of Babylonian origin.Footnote 9
The Social Range of ‘Beamtennamen’
For establishing the intended message of a ‘Beamtenname’ (defined here as names invoking the king), it is easiest to start with the observation that the use of these names was restricted. Kings or members of the royal family did not bear them, unless they had been named before they or their family members gained the throne, as was the case with Nergal-šarru-uṣur (Neriglissar) and Bēl-šarru-uṣur (Belshazzar), son of Nabonidus. ‘Beamtennamen’ are also conspicuously absent among the Babylonian urban upper class – that is, the propertied landowners, be they priestly rentiers or more enterepreneurially oriented landowners.Footnote 10 Only a few individuals bearing a family name had a ‘Beamtenname’ as a given name or as a patronym.Footnote 11 This suggests that the message that a ‘Beamtenname’ sought to project was not part of the general outlook of this class of people.
The ‘bi-polar’ temple administrations are the sector of state administration in first millennium BCE Babylonia that we are best informed about (Reference Jursa, Archi and BramantiJursa 2015; Reference Jursa, de Boer and Dercksen2017). There, descendants of local priestly families worked side by side with representatives of the central government. The latter were typically designated as qīpu ‘(royal) commissioner’ or as ša rēš šarri bēl piqitti ‘courtier (and) supervisor’. While both groups were dependent on royal approval, they hailed from different backgrounds. For priests, their origin in certain families was normally a precondition for their access to office.Footnote 12 The family background of the royal officials, by contrast, is less clear: they were very rarely even given patronyms, let alone family names (Reference Jursa, Archi and BramantiJursa 2015). The crown, not their own family, was the principal point of reference that these individuals related to and from which they drew their legitimisation, as seen in their not infrequent conflicts with local priests (Reference Jursa and GordinJursa and Gordin 2018; Reference LevaviLevavi 2018). This allegiance to the crown is what ‘Beamtennamen’ were intended to signal.
However, it is by no means true that the majority of officials bore such names. Of the twelve royal commissioners in Sippar, only five had a ‘Beamtenname’;Footnote 13 in Uruk, only five of thirteen (Reference KleberKleber 2008, 30–2). Of the thirty courtiers listed in Bongenaar’s Sippar prosopography (Reference Bongenaar1997, 108–12), eight have a name including the element šarru; in Uruk, it is 30 per cent (Reference Jursa, Wiesehöfer, Rollinger and LanfranchiJursa 2011, 165, n. 34). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, among the twenty-one palace officials named in what is preserved of the pertinent part of Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘Hofkalender’, just one person had a ‘Beamtenname’ (Reference Da RivaDa Riva 2013). In light of this data, the question arises as to whether it was entirely optional for officials to bear such a name.
There is no direct evidence about the moment and circumstances when an official received a ‘Beamtenname’. If such a name was selected by a person’s parents, or by the name-bearer himself, this might be seen as an aspirational act – an indication of a hoped-for career or allegiance. If such a name was awarded at his actual appointment to office, it was very likely conferred upon him by the same authority that invested him with the office.
Ethnicity is likely one important factor here. From a social and ethno-linguistic point of view, the royal administration had a different setting than the city and temple administrations. In the bilingual environment of Babylonia in the sixth and later centuries, the crown was far more open to the use of Aramaic than the temple administrations or the Babylonian urban bourgeoisie. The Aramaic scribes (sēpiru) that appear in the documentation from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II onwards were usually employed by the crown. In the Persian period, royal Aramaic scribes were made obligatory members of the board of temple administrators (Reference Jursa, Lanfranchi, Bonacossi, Pappi and PonchiaJursa 2012). An investigation of the largest distinct group of royal officials – the courtiers (ša rēši) and their fifth-century homologues, the chamberlains (ustarbaru) – shows that many of these men were of non-Babylonian origin. Some were Arameans or generally West Semites;Footnote 14 a significant number was of Egyptian extraction, especially after the Persian conquest (Reference Jursa, Archi and BramantiHackl and Jursa 2015); and yet others were of Elamite or Iranian origin, or they bore names that resist etymological explanation (Reference Jursa, Wiesehöfer, Rollinger and LanfranchiJursa 2011). Arguably, many of these courtiers were at least partly deracinated professionals of administration who owed what privileges they had to the king. Their identity rested in their name and title, as the naming customs in administrative and legal documents bear out: while an ordinary Babylonian needed to be named with his patronym and, if applicable, with his family name to be fully defined from a legal point of view, for a courtier his own name and his title were sufficient: there was no legal need for further details.
Courtiers of non-Babylonian extraction must have been under pressure to integrate also with respect to their name. Such a scenario probably lies behind the double name of ‘Maše-Emūn, son of Sa-x-tukku, the royal courtier, whose name is Iddin-Nabû’ (Reference BlochBloch 2018 no. 80, ca. 28 Dar I). While this man took an unmarked Babylonian name, it is highly likely that in many other cases a name was chosen that reflected the allegiances of the courtier, a ‘Beamtenname’. I would suggest that this is the raison d’être of many of these names not only for courtiers but also for royal officials in general. Sometimes, we get confirmation of this hypothesis in the form of non-Babylonian patronyms or non-Babylonian ethnic affiliations of bearers of ‘Beamtennamen’. Of a total of eighty-two bearers of ‘Beamtennamen’ for whom patronyms are known, twenty men had a demonstrably non-Babylonian background.Footnote 15 Some of these individuals are:
Nabû-šarru-uṣur, the Egyptian (UCP 9/1 29)
Sîn-šarru-uṣur, son of Pasia (probably an Egyptian patronym; Nbk. 382)
Zababa-šarru-uṣur, son of Il-ta-ma-mu, the Elamite (YOS 19 253)
Gabbi-ilī-šarru-uṣur, son of Iltehr-hanan (an Aramaic patronym; Cyr. 177)
Šarru-dūru, son of ˁEdrā (an Aramaic patronym; TCL 13 193)
Bayt-il-šarru-uṣur, son of Nabû-rapaˀ (an Aramaic patronym; BM 74520)
Nabû-šarrūssu-ukīn, son of Nabû-iltala (an Aramaic patronym; BM 27967+; BM 94541)
Šarru-lū-dari, son of Abu-nūr (an Aramaic patronym; JCS 24 106)
Šamaš-šarru-uṣur, son of Milki-rām (a Phoenician patronym; Reference JursaJursa 1998 no. 2)
Abī-râm, son of Sîn-šarru-uṣur (son with an Aramaic name; OECT 10 113)
Aḫu-lakun, son of Nergal-šarru-uṣur (son with an Aramaic name; BE 8/1 85)
The evidence is sufficient to argue that ‘Beamtennamen’ will very often have been a signal of achieved or intended integration and loyalty given by, or required from, (relative) outsiders. However, while such a signal was not required from everyone – not all officials bore ‘Beamtennamen’ – is it possible to say that whoever actually did bear such a name did have a close relationship to the crown?
It is not possible to give an entirely conclusive answer to this question: we simply do not have sufficiently clear prosopographical data to establish the institutional affiliation of every single bearer of a ‘Beamtenname’. Several points are clear, though. First, as stated earlier, the likelihood that a bearer of a ‘Beamtenname’ was a member of one of the well-established urban clans, and especially of a priestly clan, is very remote. Second, the more unusual šarru-names are strong signals for an affiliation with the royal administration. This is true, for instance, for the types DN-balāṭ-šarri-iqbi, DN-šarrūssu-ukīn, DN-šulum-šarri, and DN-mār-šarri-uṣur. All (or nearly all) bearers of such names can be shown to have been officials based on their titles or the context of their attestations.
In other cases, we may well lack information that would allow us to place bearers of ‘Beamtennamen’ in their proper context. To quote one example, a relatively large number of such names are found among the shepherds and chief shepherds working for the Eanna temple, such as the ‘chief of cattle’ (rab būli) Arad-Bēl, son of Šarru-ukīn (AnOr 8 67; etc.), and his brother Anu-šarru-uṣur, son of Šarru-ukīn, who also was a shepherd (YOS 7 140, 161). Two šarru-names in two generations must be indicative. Nothing in the attested activities of these men suggests a close relationship to the crown, but we know that shepherds were to some degree outsiders who had a contractual relationship with the temple, and they may well have been drawn from a segment of the Urukean population that depended on the king.
On the other hand, however, we regularly encounter šarru-names among temple ‘oblates’ (širku). Two examples from the Eanna temple are Anu-šarru-uṣur (TCL 13 170) and Eanna-šarru-uṣur (YOS 7 89). These individuals owed service obligations to the temple and did not have a close – or, indeed, any – relationship to the crown; in fact, we can probably exclude the existence of such a relationship. This is sufficient evidence to state that a ‘Beamtenname’ is not a fail-safe indication for identifying an official. The reason why humble oblates like those mentioned earlier might bear a ‘Beamtenname’ eulogising the king – a kind of name that is, after all, quite rare and thus ‘marked’ – cannot be established. The reason will have lain in their personal histories. One possible pathway is suggested by the following evidence: ‘Ea-šarru-bulliṭ, slave of Nabû-šarru-uṣur, the courtier’ (YOS 6 138) and ‘Šarru-mītu-uballiṭ, slave of the qīpu’ (PTS 3313). These slaves of two royal officials bear ‘Beamtennamen’. The message of the names – which were almost certainly given to them by their masters – reflects the values of the name-givers, the masters. It is thus conceivable that oblates with ‘Beamtennamen’ had a similar background to these two slaves: they might have been manumitted slaves of officials who had been gifted to the temple to serve it as širkus.
Conclusions
Names built around the element šarru ‘king’ either eulogise or bless the king, or they cast him in a quasi-divine role. The second type falls out of use after the end of the long sixth century, the first becomes obsolete in the early decades of the Hellenistic period. Overall, these names are rare and therefore ‘marked’. In most cases they will have indicated a close relationship to the king. When such names are borne by officials – as they often, but not universally, are – they may emphasise their allegiance to the crown with a view towards masking or cancelling an outsider’s identity. We also see such names used for slaves and temple dependents; in these cases it is likely that the names were chosen by someone with authority over these people who had a close relationship to the crown. Names of this type are very rare among the members of the prestigious urban clans, especially among priests, and their occasional occurrence in such circles must be considered an exception with probably specific reasons that remain unknown. In other words, while a ‘Beamtenname’ on its own is not sufficient evidence to identify an official, it is very good grounds to assume that the name-bearer is not a priest. Therefore, we can say that Amurru-šarru-uṣur, chief administrator (šatammu) of the Amurru temple Ekurgal (YBC 4038; Reference SackSack 1977, 43–4), is almost certainly an exception to the rule that the šatammu was usually chosen from the ranks of local priestly families.
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