The Incidence of Labour-Service in the Old Babylonian Period

Abstract

SCHOLARS RECOGNISED long ago that the corvee was a permanent feature of life in ancient Mesopotamia, which must have existed from the very earliest times. Indeed, under the conditions which prevailed in this first hydraulic society, it could hardly have been otherwise. Large gangs of men were needed to dig and maintain canals and irrigation ditches, and were employed upon a wide range of other works as well. When an institution is so all pervasive, it tends to be taken for granted, and to arouse little contemporary comment. However, there was one aspect of the corvee which did attract attention and leave its mark on the surviving evidence. However necessary forced labour may be, it can never be popular. It formed a natural point of friction between the Crown and its subjects, and granted its necessity, could also act as a source of dispute between different social groups, each trying to unload its burden upon the others. Both these points are niade perfectly clear by the well-known text babylonische Firstenspiegel, I which classes the imposition of forced labour upon the citizens of Nippur, Sippar and Babylon as one of the most heinous offences of which a king could be guilty. The exemptions claimed in this text have a very long history,2 but the very frequency with which they were conceded shows that they were precariously held and often infringed. And if the citizens of these great and ancient cities were not always able to avoid service, we may be sure that the obligations of the other inhabitants of Babylonia were heavy and difficult to avoid. Unfortunately, the evidence which we possess is scanty and hard to interpret, especially as regards the incidence of service which fell upon the different classes of society. In this paper, I propose to examine this problem on the basis of the royal proclamations of the Isin-Larsa period. The other evidence which we possess from Old Babylonian times has in recent years been greatly enriched by the publication of the texts from Mari. However these consist principally of letters and administrative records and deal with practice rather than policy, and it will be more convenient to handle them separately.3 We may take as the starting point of our enquiry a passage from the Prologue to the Code of Lipit-Istar, which has recently been published in a considerably improved version.4 This offers fresh information upon the period of service which was demanded the Crown under the dynasty of Isin, and the basis upon which it was levied. Lipit-Istar claims that he had, upon the instructions of Enlil, established justice in the land, and goes on: I (re) established the liberty of the 1 F. M. Th. Bohl, MAOG, XI. 3 (1937). Most recently published as Advice to a Prince, in W. G. Lambert's Babylonian Wisdom Literature, pp. 110 ff. and plates 31 and 32. The lines which deal with the corvee are 23-30, dealing with a direct royal imposition of labour, and 55-59, dealing with forced labour on the temples of the gods. I hope it is not too cynical to point out that since only divine sanctions are called down upon the guilty king, it may be that the citizens themselves had only slight powers to affect the issue. However, it is important to compare this claim for freedom from both forms of service with UMBS V 66 V 1'-14', where Ime-Dagan of Isin frees the citizens of Nippur from military service in order to work on the temples of Enlil and other gods. 2 Those recorded from the Isin-Larsa period have been collected by D. 0. Edzard in Der ' zweite Zwischenzeit ' Babyloniens, see especially pp. 80 ff. It is from this work that the last two ref s. in the previous note were drawn. Since I have taken the liberty to differ from Dr. Edzard on certain points of interpretation, it is all the more necessary to stress my dependence on his work (henceforth ZZB) in this paper. 8 I hope to deal with the evidence from Mari shortly in another paper. There were a number of problems of method which made it difficult to include a discussion of this material here. 4ZZB, pp. 95-98. According to his note 470 on p. 96, this passage has also been discussed by I. M. D'yakonov, in Vestnik Drevnei Istorii, 1952.3, p. 220, note 15, which I have not seen. Nor is the translation and Commentary upon the Code by A. Falkenstein and M. san Nicolk, Orientalia, 19 (1950), pp. 103-118 yet available to me. See F. R. Steele, The Code of Lipit-Itar, Museum Monographs, University of Pennsylvania (reprinted from AJA, 52 (1948), pp. 424-450), and E. Szlechter, Le Code de Lipit-IJtar, RA, 51 (1957), p. 57 ff., with commentary in following numbers.