Eunuchs – 7th century BCE

[JesusA (imported)]

In my reading today, I ran across the following paragraph (with its accompanying footnotes and bibliography). I thought that some readers here might be interested in the large number of eunuchs to be found in the court of one of the small states that bordered the Assyrian Empire.

I own all of the articles cited, except for the critical one by Diakanoff, which I will need to order through interlibrary loan.

I will also try to post brief summaries of the relevant parts of these articles. Watanabe, for example, points out that at least one eunuch briefly held the throne of the Assyrian Empire and that eunuchs served as archers in the Assyrian military, as well as being among the military officers.

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Eunuchs were the mainstay of the staff of the royal households of Assyria and Babylonia and surrounding kingdoms.74 Not only domestic staff, eunuchs also filled a significant number of high offices in the administration of the Assyrian empire.75

FOOTNOTES:

74. On the widespread employment of eunuchs in Neo-Assyrian administration, see Grayson 1995; Deller 1999; and Watanabe 1999, 319. Diakonoff 1977, 338–39, offers impressive statistics on the number of eunuchs (3,892, or some 70% of all personnel) employed in the palace of the Urartian king Rusa II, a contemporary of Gyges in Lydia and Esarhaddon in Assyria. [Rusa II reigned 685–645 BCE. Urartu was centered on modern Armenia, north of the Assyrian Empire.]

75. Grayson 1995, 93–94 and 98, where other scholarship is cited.

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Deller, Karlheinz

1999. “The Assyrian Eunuchs and Their Predecessors.” In Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East. ed. K. Watanabe. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter. pp. 95–115.

Diakonoff, Igor Michailovich

1977. “On Cybele and Attis in Phrygia and Lydia.” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 25, pp. 338–39.

Grayson, A. Kirk

1995. “Eunuchs in Power: Their Role in the Assyrian Bureaucracy.” In Festschrift für Wolfram Freiherr von Sodan, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 240, ed. M. Dietrich and O. Oretz. Neukirchen-Vluyn. pp. 85–98.

Watanabe, Kazuko

1999. “Seals of Neo-Assyrian Officials.” In Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East. ed. K. Watanabe. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter. pp. 313–66.

SOURCE:

Munn, Mark

2006. The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, page 157.