Early Mesopotamian land sales.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.

1. ELTS

   The appearance of ELTS marks an important milestone in the study of third-millennium Mesopotamia. Promised for forty years, this study expanded from a planned edition of seven inscriptions on stone to an edition of fifty-seven documents on stone and clay, together with an analysis of 282 miscellaneous sale contracts. The project was begun by Gelb, but other commitments, not to mention the constant accretion of new material and the sheer size of the undertaking as it evolved, stood in the way of its completion. Gelb traveled to museums throughout the world to find new sources and collate previously published ones; various scholars contributed copies, information, collations, and new sources to the enterprise. Important assistance was rendered by Whiting in the later stages of the project, and the work was at last brought to completion after Gelb's death by Steinkeller, who reworked the entire manuscript and added new copies, readings, interpretations, and important insights. The result is a major monument to Gelb's vision, a vision which expanded even as Gelb's own appreciation of the possibilities of third-millennium written sources deepened and matured. Though the final product lacks the clarity of focus that makes Gelb's monographs and essays such pleasurable reading, it makes up for this by presenting a splendor of information and ideas such that every student of this period will turn to it as a basic source.

   The book is divided into twelve chapters. There is an introductory essay discussing the term "kudurru" and such matters as the date, provenience, material, and form of the objects, the language of the inscriptions, the commodities sold, the buyers and sellers, legal formulary, and remarks on landed property in the light of the kudurrus and sale documents. The second chapter deals separately with the "earliest kudurrus" (nos. 1-12, 18, 19; why they are not numbered sequentially is unclear). Text editions follow, in fifty-two numbers (no. 19 is two pieces, no. 30 is three, no. 32 is one but includes an extra text called "appendix to no. 32"). The fourth chapter is indexes to texts nos. 10-52. The fifth chapter is, first, a list of kudurrus, then a list of sale documents. No cut-off date is given for this list, but it appears to be six or more years before the imprint date of the volume, though occasional references to later work have been worked into the text here and there (e.g., p. 12). The sixth chapter is, first, a "structure and typology" of nos. 14-16, 21-23, 32-38, 40-42, then a chronologically arranged structure and typology of third-millennium sale documents from the Fara through the Ur III periods. The seventh chapter discusses the terminology of both the kudurrus and the sale documents, treated together. The eighth chapter includes tables of prices for fields in the kudurrus and the prices of fields, houses, orchards, slaves ("persons" here, but "human beings" in the tenth and eleventh chapters, "humans," p. 216), animals, dates, and gold in the sale documents, treated separately. The ninth chapter treats additional payments in kudurrus nos. 14-16, 22-23, 36, 37, 40-41, 43-44, and the Fara sale documents. The tenth chapter summarizes rates for barley, dates, oil, copper, wool, textiles, metals, animals, and slaves. The eleventh chapter is a brief glossary of the commodities referred to in the kudurrus and sale documents. The twelfth chapter is a lexical index to the entire volume. Volume 2 consists of photographs, copies of the texts and sketches of the reliefs, and various large charts.

   As for the specific responsibility of each author, the reviewer has attempted to apportion praise and blame according to the explanation of Steinkeller, p. xvii, recognizing that the work could never have appeared, at long last, without Steinkeller's dedication to completing it.(1)

   The evolutionary nature of this work is shown by its title, which sounds like a holdover from an earlier stage of this project. One hopes that the authors do not claim that their sources document "earliest land tenure in the Near East," as few would doubt that land tenure long antedates this documentation. Rather, the book is a study of third-millennium sale documents, together with an edition of all documents on stone mentioning land, plus clay tablets containing multiple sales of land. Documents in clay that record only one transaction in land are not edited. However, the analysis takes into account all sale documents known at the time of publication, even though many of them have nothing to do with land. One finds that the crucial criterion was land, at first, but ended up being sale. Hence the reader interested in land tenure is going to find less to interest him than a reader interested in early sale formulae, and one opines that non-Assyriologists who are attracted to this work by its title are liable to be disappointed. A more descriptive title would have been "Earliest Land Sale Documents in the Near East." Furthermore, what the authors mean by "systems" is not explained. No "system" is anywhere described in the book, and, past the title page, the word occurs but once or twice, in passing, throughout the entire text. Therefore this part of the title might well have been omitted.

   A text edition of the core corpus (nos. 1-52) would have made a more manageable project. The decision to add, partway through the discourse, as it were, a much larger corpus of texts, including unedited and even unpublished documents, many of them irrelevant to questions of land tenure, makes the book both unwieldy and incomplete. A separate edition of the Presargonic and Sargonic sale documents, at least those not available in modern editions, could then have included a study of sale of property in the third millennium, based on the kudurru volume and the edition of sale documents. This could also have allowed for inclusion of Gelb's analytic chapters that were removed from the kudurru publication. As ELTS stands now, it is more than a study of sale of land, but less than a study of sale per se, so the reader is left with a sense of incompleteness, despite its massive bulk.

2. KUDURRUS AND OWNERSHIP OF LAND

   The opening chapter offers a survey of the documents (a synopsis of them appears, however, only on pp. 187-89), together with a justification of Gelb's term for them, kudurrus. The authors are aware of the disadvantages of using this word, and this reader would have recommended discarding it as used in ELTS. It here includes inscriptions on stone that may have nothing to do with land tenure and was extended to clay tablets as well. Generally, the authors avoid the fallacy of discussing the third-millennium kudurrus as if they were the Kassite or early Neo-Babylonian objects properly referred to by that term, but an exception is p. 22, where one finds the argument that if Kassite kudurrus were "records to be deposited in the temple, then the same point may be applied to the ancient kudurrus." This does not follow, though interesting independent arguments are offered for the idea that some at least of the ancient kudurrus were found in temples, having been deposited before the gods or even, long after they were made, retained as museum pieces. The authors suggest that the kudurrus were intended as publicity for the acts they record. This is possible, but the arguments offered give no support to their proposal, insofar as they have to do with other, cone-shaped objects. There were elements of publicity in land sales (including witnesses, oaths, rituals, use of a public herald), but there is no indication that these stones were public in the sense that some of the aforementioned acts were. Nor is there mention of the stones in their own texts, as was customary in some later commemorative inscriptions and kudurrus, referring to their installation. Gods are not listed, invoked, or portrayed in the texts, an odd state of affairs for a monument the authors think might be intended for a temple. Where the term "kudurru" is extended to include certain clay tablets which contain transactions resembling those of the kudurrus, the authors suggest that these may be copies or drafts (rather than more modest examples of the same thing), perhaps confusing medium and message. For ITT II 5893, which may in fact be a clay copy of a lost kudurru, see below.

   There is a brief but interesting essay on "land tenure conditions" as seen in the kudurrus, for which Steinkeller assumes responsibility, noting (p. xvii) that it replaces Gelb's interpretation as originally prepared for ELTS. The student of Gelb's work can only be disappointed that his essay, already completed in the 1970s, did not see the light of day, though main points are to be found already in "On the Alleged Temple and State Economies in Ancient Mesopotamia," in Studi in onore di Eduardo Volterra (Milan: Giuffre, 1971), 6:137-54 and in "From Freedom to Slavery," in Gesellschaftsklassen im alten Zweistromland und in den angrenzenden Gebieten, ed. D. O. Edzard (= ABAW, n.F., 75 [1972]), 81-92. Steinkeller outlines a proposal that larger holdings and more extensive private (individually owned) land were found in northern Babylonia; next there was a transitional zone of northern influence in Sumer (Adab, Isin, Nippur), with some private land, but far less private land in the south of Sumer (Lagash, Uruk), together with more extensive temple estates in the south. This refines an older thesis of non-Soviet scholars that large family holdings and private land were not typical of Sumer but were more characteristic of Akkad (J. Renger, RLA 3:662a, s.v. "Grundeigentum"; A. Falkenstein, "The Sumerian Temple City" [trans. M. Ellis], MANE 1.1:16; differently Diakonoff, Sumer, 43, note 1, who stresses the wide distribution of sale documents).

   To complicate matters, documents from northern Babylonia point to extended family ownership, while the transitional and southern documents point to individual...