Article

From Sumer to Assyria: The term 'black-headed people' in Assyrian texts

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Abstract

The inhabitants of (southern) Mesopotamia are sometimes referred to as the 'black-headed people' (sag-ge(6)) in Sumerian texts. This term came to be used also in Akkadian texts (translated as salmat qaqqadi), including in Neo-Assyrian texts, much distant in time and place from ancient Sumer. This paper seeks to describe how the term is used in Neo-Assyrian rhetorical and mundane texts; how frequent it is, what it means, and what variations there are (and how these can be explained). With the aid of various database searches and book surveys, 48 attestations were collected. These derive from the Middle Assyrian (3) and Late Neo-Assyrian (or Sargonid) (45) periods, and focus on how the black-headed are positioned in relation to the kings and the deities. The imagery of the black-headed as (shep)herded was found to be the most important one. As for variations in terms of frequency and meaning, while time period and ruler turned out to be explanatory factors, the same can not be said of provenance, genre, and subject matter. The texts in which the attestations appear are most often not (southern) building inscriptions and they are not very often from or about southern Mesopotamia.

How to Cite:

Karlsson, M., (2020) “From Sumer to Assyria: The term 'black-headed people' in Assyrian texts”, Akkadica 141(2), 127–139.

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