THE SURVIVAL FITNESS OF MEMES IN THE INHERITANCE DIVISIONS FROM OLD BABYLONIA SIPPAR

Abstract

Today, the clay tablets chiselled by Old Babylonian scribes from the city-state of Sippar are our only evidence of the legal conventions from oral agreements between family members in the division of their inheritance. But why would the Old Babylonians, a predominantly oral culture, go to the expense of hiring a scribe? On face value, it seems understandable that the recording of the division of the inheritance was for the sake of standardisation, legibility and simplification (Yoffee 1991). However, there is more to it. In this paper, I present Dawkins’ meme theory (1976) and assert that the legal conventions of division agreements and scribal school practices in Old Babylonian Sippar are a “meme complex”, a group of memes that co-adapt in order to ensure their own replication (Blackmore 1999, Dawkins 1976, Dennett 1991). The question still remains: why do these memes survive? I propose that the structures of the filters of such memes — driven by simplicity — are standardisation, certainty and legibility. They promote the memes in their evolutionary algorithm of variation, selection and retention. Thus, the recording of the oral division agreement is merely a record designed to protect and carry on the division agreement’s scribal school practices and, to a lesser degree, its legal conventions.