Babylonian Sippar Research Articles

Ransom and Quittance in Early Old Babylonian Sippar: a New Text

Cet article publie la tablette et l’enveloppe d’un document juridique paléo-babylonien archaïque. Le texte enregistre le règlement d’une réclamation, également décrite dans la tablette comme une rançon. Le contexte possible de la rançon est exploré, ainsi que le statut du texte. La quittance était un document permanent, qui protégeait non seulement le payeur mais aussi les membres de sa famille contre le risque d’une réouverture de la réclamation.

CONTRACTUAL MAINTENANCE SUPPORT OF A PRIESTESS-SISTER IN THREE OLD BABYLONIAN SIPPAR DIVISION AGREEMENTS

Generally, the family members conclude a division agreement of their inheritance received from a parental deceased estate to escape the perils of their shared inheritance by dividing it into portions of unburdened sole ownership. However, in some Old Babylonian Sippar division agreements, the family members devised and agreed to burden an elected inheritance property with a sui generis usufruct. This entails that they contractually agreed to share or appropriate to a family member the responsibility to manage the burdened property and use of its proceeds, for the maintenance and support of their priestess-sister. Only in the event of the priestess-sister's death is the burdened property restored from the restraints of the usufruct. In the article, I have applied my developed analysis method to the study of three Old Babylonian Sippar division agreements which consist of a usufruct-clause. First, I outline the prerequisite elements of the analysis method, which identify the three texts as a family division agreement from a deceased estate. Then follows a discussion of the legal practices found in the three texts of which the usufruct as a chosen legal practice receives special attention. The aim of the article is to show that family members can decide to utilise the sui generis usufruct in the division agreement for the maintenance and support of their priestess-sister, imposing on themselves lifelong personal and financial consequences, while ensuring that the family retain their property on the death of the priestess-sister.

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

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.

The Career and the Seal of Bulālum, Doorkeeper of the Ebabbar Temple at Sippar

Abstract This article discusses the career and the seal of Bulālum, a temple official of the Ebabbar, the Samas temple in Old Babylonian Sippar. His career shows a long and as-yet inexplicable gap in which neither he nor his seal are attested. Also, his seal displays some remarkable changes throughout the period in which it was used. The first changes in the seal occur shortly before the gap in Bulālum’s period of attested activity. At the end of that period, the seal had undergone further changes. I analyze the changes in the seal and the pattern of attestations of both the seal in its different phases and its owner, and evaluate several possible explanations for this pattern and for the seal’s changing appearance.

“He took him as his son”. Adoption in old Babylonian Sippar

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre>Traditionnellement, l&#8217;adoption &#224; l&#8217;&#233;poque pal&#233;o-babylonienne a &#233;t&#233; &#233;tudi&#233;e dans une perspective strictement juridique (David 1927, Kl&#237;ma 1940, Westbrook 1993). C&#8217;est seulement r&#233;cemment qu&#8217;est parue une &#233;tude mettant l&#8217;accent sur les aspects sociaux et &#233;conomiques de l&#8217;adoption &#224; Nippur &#224; l&#8217;&#233;poque pal&#233;o-babylonienne (Stone/Owen 1991). Le pr&#233;sent article a pour but d&#8217;&#233;tablir les bases d&#8217;une &#233;tude de l&#8217;adoption en tant que ph&#233;nom&#232;ne socio-&#233;conomique &#224; Sippar &#224; l&#8217;&#233;poque pal&#233;o-babylonienne. Il pr&#233;sente le corpus des documents d&#8217;adoption de Sippar et, comme premi&#232;re approche, analyse sa composition et certaines de ses caract&#233;ristiques les plus notables. L&#8217;article inclut deux &#233;tudes de cas qui illustrent les motivations socio-&#233;conomiques de l&#8217;adoption.

Officials of the Šamaš Temple of Sippar as Contract Witnesses in the Old Babylonian Period

Little is known about the organisation of the Samastemple in Old Babylonian Sippar, the Ebabbar. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of attestations of the temple of- ficials of the Ebabbar are to be found in the witness lists of contracts. In these lists they occur together, as a group. The present article analyzes the formative stages of this group of witnesses, shedding light on institutional hierarchy, succession into temple offices, and the sealing practice of the time.

Another connection between Sippar and Syria?

On the basis of cylinder seal impressions from the Middle Bronze Age strata of Tell Hammam al-Turkman (Syria) a case is made for cultural and possibly commercial connections between that site and the region of Old Babylonian Sippar in Iraq.

Notes on Some Family Property in Old Babylonian Sippar

L'auteur propose un compte-rendu des textes paleobabyloniens de Sippar, conserves a Istanbul, contenant des listes de biens mettant en lumiere le fonctionnement de la propriete familiale en Basse Mesopotamie

Notes on the Slave Names of Old Babylonian Sippar

Notes on the Slave Names of Old Babylonian Sippar

On Kinship and Inheritance in Old Babylonian Sippar

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”.

Notes on the Nomenclature of Old Babylonian Sippar

In my study of the Old Babylonian Sippar material, which necessitated the organizatioll of an elaborate filing system, I became increasingly aware of the fact that one untapped source of information on the everyday life of the Sipparians was the thousands of personal names (perhaps as many as 18,000) that had been collected and alphabetically arranged. I will here present gleanings from these names and some random observations. First a preliminary question must be raised. Given the accidental nature of our material, as well as the fact that we have in the collection an unknown fraction of the original material, to what extent is the body of personal names we do have representative of the nomenclature of Sipparians? This question was answered by a group of some 400 :EBritish Museum tablets that Professor Leo Oppenheim transliterated for the Sipper Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago some years ago. An examination of the theophoric names in this new group (and theophoric names constitute the overwhelming type of name) yielded the following results. Only a8 new names were added to the 1025 already on file. Breaking this down further, only 8 new elements were added to the 163 theophorous elements used with the god Sin, 9 new elements to the 211 Samas names, and one to the 45 Enlil names. Several deities appeared in the names of the new group who had not occurred previously, e.g., Tessup, Hulsu, Malik, and Elali. From these data one could conclude that our earlier collection contained a fairly good cross-section of Sipparian personal names. I first investigated to what extent the official religion of Sippar influenced the nomenclature, and found the following. Generally speaking 70 % of all the theophoric names contain the names of gods belonging to the official pantheon of Sippar, i e., of gods who had either a complex temple