KAJ 118: forty sacks of palace straw

A named administrative artefact

KAJ 118 is catalogued as CDLI P282131, collection VAT 08819 and excavation Ass 14327 by in Aššur's M 10 archive. The genre is recorded as a receipt. Because several scholarly references discuss the document, retaining the KAJ and modern corpus numbers makes it easier to compare readings instead of repeating the same object as independent evidence.

Straw and official custody

The edition's opening passage records forty sacks of straw associated with the palace and an institutional chain of custody, with named stewards, retainers and other people involved. The names and offices matter as much as the quantity: a palace supply chain was organised through specific recorded intermediaries. That does not establish whether the straw was delivered in full, stored for animals, used in construction or reallocated for another purpose.

The visible and invisible work

Agricultural production becomes visible here through an accounted commodity and the offices that handled it. The people who gathered the straw, transported it or needed it in a household are much less visible. The tablet cannot supply their family histories, work conditions or a regional crop estimate. The record says something concrete about palace management while leaving most daily experience outside the scope of its writer.

Straw belonged to the agricultural economy alongside grain. Collecting, storing and moving it could require supervision, making it worth recording. The account draws attention to a resource less conspicuous than royal gifts or precious metal.

The connection between material and responsibility is the important mechanism. An institution treated it as something to manage; the entry does not establish the complete harvest from which it came.

Do not turn a receipt into a harvest

A future close reading should verify the measure, the precise number of named persons and the syntactic relationships of custody and receipt in the complete edition. Comparing other M 10 documents might reveal repeated roles or changing allocations, but that requires identification checks. Without those, the responsible conclusion is narrow: a Middle Assyrian archive retained one administrative account concerning palace straw and named officials.

Cultivation, harvesting, separation and handling preceded the stage recorded on a tablet. Explaining these operations is general agricultural reasoning, not a claim that the entry names every worker.

It cannot determine every later use of the straw or reconstruct a full workforce. It still preserves a specific administrative concern within farming and supply. That information restores part of the material basis of institutions known more spectacularly through monuments.