Karen, tell me please, who is typically chosen to be a governor? >> Typically, from the reign of Ashurnasirpal onwards in the ninth century, it would be a eunuch. A eunuch, as you know, is a castrated man. Governors were not necessarily eunuchs, but very, very, very frequently. They would be distinguished in bureaucratic language from bearded men as “those of the head”. So that seems to refer to the fact that they would not have a beard. Every other adult man in Syria would wear a beard, a big beard, a Victorian-style beard, like these two [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> Indeed, like Crown Prince Sennacherib and King Sargon back there. That's how an Assyrian adult man would look like, but not a eunuch because Assyrian eunuchs were castrated before the onset of puberty and therefore, wouldn't have to shave in order to achieve a smooth look. They would be incapable of growing a beard for hormonal reasons and so they would be distinguished from the “bearded ones” and that, of course, implies that there are also normal men in the service of the king acting as provincial governors. But when the king speaks about his provincial governors, he very often refers to them as “my governors, my eunuchs”, which emphasises that a large share of them would have been eunuchs. Yeah, and that's a new thing, really, in the ninth century, because before that, eunuchs had a very different role. >> So, can you expand a little bit about what the traditional role of a eunuch in the royal palace would have been according to whatever dates you prefer. >> So from the ninth century onwards in Assyria’s imperial phase they would be sent out into the provinces to act as provincial governor, so occupying really the most important positions in the provinces. And before that, they would have been for many, many hundreds of years, there would have been eunuchs in the palace as part of the royal family. Not just in Assyria, but in all royal courts of the Middle East. And that's to do with this very special family setup of the royal family that we already discussed in another context, and we can return to that. We have said that a main distinction between an ordinary family and the royal family would be that an ordinary family would have a couple at its centre, a husband and the wife. And they would have a monogamous relationship, despite the fact that the husband, of course, could father children with other women, typically slave women. Legally, he could only have one wife, and legally the only children that qualified as his heirs, boys and girls, because we said girls would also receive a share of the paternal estate in the form of the dowry. The only children that would be legally qualified to be his heirs, Would be the offspring of his wife, his one wife. And we said that the king, on the other hand, couldn't afford to risk this. Couldn't afford to maybe choose a wife who couldn't have children. That would be really dangerous for the continuity of the royal line. And therefore, the king always had several spouses, only one however would be the queen. All the children of all the spouses, not only of the queen however, would be his children, his legal children, his heirs. They would be the daughters of the king and the sons of the king and would therefore be legally members of the royal family. Quite different from the ordinary setup where we've this distinction between the core family and the slaves that live with them. Now that means that the way continuity through the generations is guaranteed, works quite differently because in the ordinary Assyrian family, the wife plays the key role. We'll talk about women in another context. There were, of course, cases where a couple couldn't have children. You could adopt. You could do various things. But in any case, the wife needed to be on board. Ultimately, it all came down to the wife. The children needed to be the wife's children, at the very least the children adopted by the wife. In the royal family, the mother is not important. Very, very often we have no idea whose mother… who was a certain king's mother. We have no idea, because the only thing that is important is the link to the king. So that's quite central. The inheritance to say goes through the father and only the father and the woman has far less importance in the royal family. And therefore you had to make absolutely sure that all children that such royal women bore, were the king’s, and only the king’s. And that's where the eunuchs come in, traditionally speaking. They were, in a way, men living at the palace that were no danger whatsoever to the purity of the royal line because they couldn't father children. We've already said that eunuchs can't have beards for hormonal reasons, well that's one thing. But, of course, much more important is the fact that they cannot father children. So we don't have to go into the medical details here really. When we talk about Assyrian eunuchs, we are not talking about people who had their penis chopped off. That's really not what's happening here. They are not able to have children because their genitals were crushed and they couldn't produce sperm like that. Other than that they were, of course, fully functioning. They were not in any way socially inferior. In a palace context, the good, good thing about a eunuch was that they could never endanger the king's line. So that's something that’s been around, from the vantage point of the early first millennium B.C., for more than a thousand years. And it's not typical at all for Assyrians; it's a typical feature of palace life- men that won't endanger in any way the purity of the royal line, very practical. They had all sorts of jobs. We mustn't think of them as sort of harem guards or something like that. Yes, in a way they could have that function too, but basically it was just a man you could have around that wouldn't interfere in any way with your royal women. That's it, really. And so they had all sorts of different roles. But are typically associated with the royal palace, and living in the palace, nothing else. And that changes, then, in the ninth century, when King Ashurnasirpal decides that it's a really good idea to send the eunuchs out of the palace into the realm, into the different provinces of the Assyrian Empire. >> That leads beautifully to my next question, which is exactly what is the benefit to the king of sending these eunuchs outside of the palace? >> For centuries, they had been closely associated with the royal court, with the king specifically. They were seen as the servants of the king, as the archetypal servants of the king. They were visibly, of course, easily distinguished from anyone else because, as we've already said, they had smooth cheeks, and they didn't have a big beard. >> So you could easily spot a eunuch. A eunuch was a typically a beardless man. There were other beardless men as well, but for other reasons in other contexts, and typically then associated with religious purity and so on. And so these beardless men would not just be beardless, but they wouldn't have any hair at all whatsoever, for reasons of cultic purity. If you encountered someone who had lush hair on their head, but no beard, then you know that this is a eunuch. This is a eunuch. And that immediately reminded you of the king. So you've got this link: someone is in power in the provinces - smooth cheeked person - it's a servant of the king. There is no question about it. So that's one plus. The other plus is, of course, that these people cannot start their own families; can't start their own dynastic line; cannot ever be in a situation where they have a son who they want to pass on power to. Because the king of Assyria had the right to always appoint governors by his own choosing. Whenever a new king came to the throne, he could reappoint a governor, but he could also put someone entirely different in charge. And whenever a governor died, there was no one to inherit the power from him, if it was a eunuch. So that's a good thing, and that's very important in this context of the ninth century when the Assyrian State had grown quite a bit, had again come to be the dominant power of the Middle East, and when one was faced (seen from the state perspective) with the question of cohesion. How do we make sure that we don't send some guy out into some remote city and he then does whatever he pleases- proclaims himself king? How do we counter this? And the eunuchs were a very good answer to this. So they were associated just from their physical appearance with the royal house. They couldn't start their own little royal house in the province. And also, they were closely linked to the royal house in their own minds. Because they “entered the palace” - that's how it's called in Assyrian, “to enter the palace” - they entered the royal court at a young age. This may have coincided with their castration. The castration may have happened later on, this we don't know for sure, but they definitely entered the palace at a young age and left their own birth family, like a young girl would have when she married. They left their own birth family behind, and instead were welcomed into the royal household, almost like a sort-of adopted child. And this was then the family that was their world, in a way. Eunuchs never ever give their father's name, which is what other Assyrians would typically do. The Assyrians didn't have family names, they referred to themselves as “X son of Y”. The eunuchs never did that, they didn't have to connect themselves to anyone else but the king. So that's the other advantage of eunuchs. The loyalty that exists between themselves and the royal family, especially the king. This went so far that it was the king's responsibility to oversee their funerary arrangements. Typically this is of course something that is done within the family, but in the case of the of the eunuchs it is the royal family's duty. And the royal family even guaranteed that they would care for the eunuchs' graves in all perpetuity. >> This is a nice lead in to my final question for you which is who is it that becomes a eunuch and why would a family give over one of their children to be a eunuch? Obviously, we are talking about men. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] So, the king's officials are men. As we said, can be men and they can be eunuchs. So eunuchs are men, of course. That's the first thing. What else can we say? We don't know their fathers’ names ever. So it's very, very difficult, not to say impossible, to reconstruct their original family context. That's sort of the point of all this, after all. You want to create a group of people who strongly identifies with the royal family, with the royal court, and have sort of left behind their original social context. So, that makes it near impossible for us to really say who they are, so we basically have to speculate. But why not, historians must speculate in the absence of concrete evidence. And here, we can, on the one hand, say that from the viewpoint of the Assyrian king, it was important to have good capable men in his service. So the eunuchs surely were chosen according to their ability. You wanted the clever ones, the promising ones, the ones that would do a good job, on board. Not every eunuch, of course, was made a provincial governor. That's quite important. But chances to become a governor were vastly greater for people who were eunuchs than for bearded ones. That's quite clear. So, when we think about who would become a eunuch, then we don't have to think so much about the personal agency of these boys. Because we are talking about boys who would enter the palace. We must consider their family background. And it's basically the decision of the family that we are trying to come to grasp with here. And we have to emphasise that volunteering your son to be a eunuch at the royal court, or a servant to the empire, that is something that offers a great deal of social mobility. This opens up career paths to people that might not be eligible by their noble birth alone. And that's the context in which we have to see this new use of royal eunuchs. Of course, as soon as you say, I don't just employ eunuchs at court, but everywhere in the empire, you'll need many, many more of them. So you basically need to make this an attractive option to the families in the realm. And the social mobility factor will have greatly appealed. We've been talking about well-to-do urban Assyrian families and we said that basically we don't quite know all that much about the younger sons. We know for a fact that they typically didn't stay in the paternal estate, they had to leave. They might go and make their fortune in the provinces. Their families may have thought that it was a good idea to have some of their younger sons enter the palace. And so the social mobility factor is, I think, the key thing here. This is something that may have been attractive to the noble families of Assyria simply because of the access that this would give them to the king. But it would have also have been appealing to less wealthy, less important families that in this way would secure a potential, wonderful career for their offspring. And in this way, one, of course, can make comparisons to the role of the church in Europe. Traditionally, the Catholic Church, of course, requires celibacy of the clergy. In many ways this is a very, very good comparison to some of the key features of eunuchs that we have discussed. Loyalty to the new institution, the inability to create one's own family that might then divide these loyalties. And essentially, a sense of merit of the individual that is put at the fore.
