The Birth of Bureaucracy: a Necessary Concession in Empire Building

A singular source of power diminishes the more it is distributed over many individuals. This is an inevitable result of expansion because of the needs that arise from governing and maintaining a larger dominion. The Assyrian king's royal court illustrates this principle because in creating administrators to help him manage the vast empire, he shares power and thus diminishes his own. The multitude of different offices and tasks appointed by the king show the enormity of the task facing the king in ruling; he must oversee the "provisioning and upkeep" of an empire as well as its growth (Joannes 94). He, being mortal, finite, and of limited mental and physical capabilities cannot possibly do it all himself, and so he appoints officials to his royal court to help him rule (Joannes 94). These administrators have varying degrees of responsibility and derivative authority, for example the major-domo is in charge of managing the palace community and caring for the military as well as collecting taxes and supplies (Joannes 94). Thus, the king does not have direct control over these aspects of his realm and concedes the real authority to the major-domo, though he has nominal authority because the major-domo acts on his behalf. In some instances, the king maintains more of his power by appointing his crown prince over the "correspondence and information departments" which basically is maintaining at least a loose control over everything, since these are critical elements of any successful administration (Joannes 94).

But overall, the king does give up a large amount of power as evidenced by the "eponymate" which is how the Assyrians kept track and named their years (Joannes 95). Each year is named after an official after the order in which they take office (Joannes 95). This is a vast difference from the Babylonian year-names system, under Hammurabi for example, which were used to glorify the king and mark the year with his accomplishments (Van De Mieroop 10). If the king is willing to sacrifice this important form of propaganda, then he must already be giving up some serious power to his administrators. This shows how important these administrators are to the king for maintaining his realm (Joannes 94-95). It is counterintuitive for the king to want to diminish his own power so significantly without some sort of benefit that outweighs the cost, so these administrators must have been necessary to managing the realm, which is supported by the fact that this system of naming years after officials (and thus, sharing power with said officials) was the norm (Joannes 95). Thus, in creating a bureaucracy the king concession of power was outweighed value of the administrators in helping him rule his empire.