On Kinship and Inheritance in Old Babylonian Sippar

Abstract

In his study on Mesopotamian inheritance F. R. Kraus remarked that greater clarification on inheritance rights might be achieved from the demographic, economic and sociological statistics yielded by specialized study of the texts. I shall here deal with the data emerging from the Old Babylonian Sippar material and my interpretation of these data, focusing solely on the question of kinship and the rights of inheritance and approaching the problem more from an anthropological perspective than a legal one. As Robin Fox in his Kinship and Marriage states, “every society makes some provision for the transfer of property on death and the transfer is usually to a kinsman … If ‘next of kin’ are to inherit, then nearness of kinship has to be defined; and among these near kin some order of preference has to be set up”.