Babylonian Society and Economy - Exam Summaries
Jan 24, 2019 21:51:18 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Jan 24, 2019 21:51:18 GMT -5
Hey all -
As I explained in a previous post on the Assyrian empire, my comprehensive exams are coming up in a number of weeks, they are a requirement of the Ph.D. program I am in here in Toronto. Basically, during the comprehensive exam, which lasts a week or so, I will have to examine and translate numerous Sumerian and Akkadian texts; in addition, I will need to be able to give in depth answers, or short essays, on the Assyrian empire and on Babylonian society. I thought I would share some of my study notes here, since they are good condensed discussion of aspects of Mesopotamian society. In preparation for the exam, I will attempt to internalize, even memorize, these summary documents which I have prepared after doing the essential reading. This information is only the basic argument for what I expect to be potential questions, the core facts - on the exam, I would also attempt to embellish the discussion with supplemental information and other sorts of discussion points.
This next set of notes is for the part of my exam which will focus on material from a class on Babylonian society and economy, completed 2017-2018. At the moment I have focused more on social factors, saving the economic stuff (which I hate working on) for later:
Freedom, Slavery, Social Class
van Dassow 2011; Culbertson 2011; Reide 2017; Baker 2001
• Babylonian society was divided into three classes: the awīlum, muškenum and a slave class, the wardum. These distinctions are evident in the law code of Hammurabi (but to some extent, in the laws from Eshnunna as well). While both awīlum and muškēnum were free classes, what distinguishes the former is the penalty of talio (i.e. physical punishments, an eye for an eye) for trespasses, while injury to a muskēnum results in a monetary fine (as is the case elsewhere in Mesopotamian law). The awīlum were the leadership of the community, having political authority and special legal protection; in the late second millennium, the term awīlum underwent a semantic shift (=slave).
• Personal liberty is unknown in the pre-modern world. Freedom in Babylonia entails the basis for full participation in the polity, a lifetime of service to the state. All free born men in Babylonia were born with work obligations to the state, quite in line with Mesopotamian religious ideology which frames mankind as being in perpetual servitude to the gods. This obligation could be resolved through a) corvée labour or b) military service. Corvée labour, the obligation to do physical labour for the state for a number of days each month, was seen as a serious burden. Failure to carry out this obligation could result in prison time, and to avoid this, documents show that the free man could hire another person to perform corvée in his place.
• In the first millennium, Babylonian kings may attempt to garner political favor by granting exemptions from labour obligations in select cities, amar-gi4/andurārum. In order to ensure essential work on canals etc. continued, this would require subjugating another city in order to replace the exempted labour force.
• The wardum: a Middle Assyrian proverb reads ‘Man is the shadow of god, and the slave shadow of man.’ It is not easy to define the exact value of wardum across genres, for example, the king is called the wardum of the gods; the basic lexical value entails some sort of servitude, and according to Mesopotamian ideology, all persons are servile. It has been argued that the concept ‘freedom’ itself is anachronistic when applied to the ancient world. At minimal, one can understand evidence from the law codes to be indicative of a distinctly lower class, the wardum: these ‘slaves’ had diminished ‘legal rights’ and entitlements in comparison to non-slaves.
• While slaves could be acquired from foreign lands or in the course of war, more commonly they were acquired in the interior: a parent may sell a child into slavery, or a person may themselves go into slavery to relieve a debt; a person could be enslaved by the court – there are some indications that, in the late period, women could be enslaved for marrying against the wishes of the father. Slaves could be bought and sold, gifted as part of a dowry or inheritance, and their labor could be lent to a creditor in lieu of payments. Slaves could be marked or branded legally identifying them as belonging to an owner or institution.
• Evidence from the late period Egibi archive suggests that slaves were mainly employed in domestic duties around the house, or in a small number of crafts, but that most agricultural work fell to tenant farmers. Slaves were occasionally trained in elite professions: a Neo-Babylonian text read in last years Babylonian dialects course, Ungnad 11, mentions a slave who functioned as a ‘scribe on parchment.’
Law
Radner 2005; Molina 2013
• Sources for law in Babylonia include the ‘law collections’, trial records, letters, sale documents, etc.
• Mesopotamian society itself is quite heterogenous: segments of the population were urban, other were rural; some groups were sedentary while others were pastoral; both state and kin structures coexisted and overlapped.
• Its possible that the oldest judicial authority in the ANE is that of the assembly of elders, an artifact of tribal law. With the onset of the state, and according to the emic view, ultimate judicial authority lay with the gods; however, in practice, judicial power was wielded by the king, who were seen to have been invested with this power by the gods for the purpose of installing order and justice in the land. For the first half of Mesopotamian history there seems to be no meaningful distinction between judicial and state authority. However, this authority was shared with officials of various sorts, and on a municipal level, with city counsels.
• In the first millennium, this was still the case for Assyria where the highest judicial authority continued to be the king. In addition, officials of various sorts and provincial governors could act as judges. However, in Babylon, the professional judge (dayyānum) is attested.
• van die Mieroop 1999 has stated “No historical discipline can take itself seriously today without paying attention to the issue of gender.” The study of gender in Mesopotamian can be divided into different approaches, what may be termed ‘traditional scholarship’ and feminist scholarship, each wave of which has a distinct set of presuppositions: while first wave sought to study women in history, second wave sought to uncover an early matriarchy in Mesopotamia, while third wave seeks to demonstrate that gender was a social construct in ancient societies (van die Mieroop 1999). In terms of theoretical approach then, a dichotomy exists at the level of nature or nurture, biological or social construction, scientific or critical epistemology – rationalist or irrationalist claims.
• Differing theoretical presuppositions result in variant methodologies and variant claims. For one scholar, the projection of the subordinate status of Islamic women onto the Mesopotamian population is a bigoted orientialist assumption; for another, perhaps on the premise that analogy is everywhere the scientist’s tool in mediating the problem of the unknown, this strategy is fair game. Often, compelling evidence one way or another rests on ambiguous data and the fine interpretation of obscure vocabulary – for example, while van die Mieroop 1999 is convinced that the words the notions ‘harem’ and ‘veil’ are red herrings in the Middle Assyrian literature, Stol 2016 is convinced of the validity of these readings.
• Traditional scholarship has generally divided the activity of men to the ‘public sphere’ and women to the ‘private sphere’ and the basis of this division has been taken to be biological (Bahrani 2001). MacGregor’s 2012 SAA volume Beyond Hearth and Home seeks to highlight women’s activity in the public sphere during the Neo-Assyrian period, the work primarily focuses on palace women, temple women and musicians. A problem with the work is that the boundaries of ‘public sphere’ are never clearly defined, and the emic conceptual connection of the house and the palace and temple are well known. The work leaves many open questions. Some claims are more dubious, for example, Assante’s 1999 rejection of “prostitute” as an acceptable translation of KAR.KID/harimtum was largely made on the grounds that, while the KAR.KID/harimtum was clearly associated with sex, there are no records of one being paid; Assante then asserts that these women were instead free, independent women who were also sexually liberated. Problematically, this dearth of information about everyday payments for the professions is the norm rather than the exception and while all sorts of information is available, records of individual payments for i.e. fornication and haircuts are not. The claim has been thoroughly rejects by Cooper in the RlA entry “Prostitution.”
Women’s roles in Mesopotamia are often opaque and subject to interpretational differences. An example is the nature of the KAR.KID often translated ‘prostitute’ about which Julia Assante has argued the KAR.KID was rather a sexually liberated free class of woman.
• While lexical uncertainty and debate serve, if anything, to further the obscurity of women’s situation in Mesopotamia, there seems to be little doubt as the generally subordinate legal status of women. van Dassow 2011 states that women in Mesopotamian were subordinated socially and legally to male custodians. Roth 1988 explains that women were mentioned either as the ‘wife-of-a-man’ or the ‘daughter-of-a-man’ in legal texts, and it is clear that in her view that the frequent adultery penalties in Mesopotamian law codes served mainly to limit the sort of punishment a husband could bring to bear – in other words, fidelity in implicit.
• Women in Mesopotamian sources are sometimes said to be “Invisible” to modern scholarship. We mainly catch glimpses of their livelihood in ‘law codes’, legal documents and administrative texts. Studies in Neo-Assyrian prosopography have shown that only some 7% of recorded names in the textual record are female.
This next set of notes is for the part of my exam which will focus on material from a class on Babylonian society and economy, completed 2017-2018. At the moment I have focused more on social factors, saving the economic stuff (which I hate working on) for later:
Socio-Economic Sketch: Babylonian
Freedom, Slavery, Social Class
van Dassow 2011; Culbertson 2011; Reide 2017; Baker 2001
• Babylonian society was divided into three classes: the awīlum, muškenum and a slave class, the wardum. These distinctions are evident in the law code of Hammurabi (but to some extent, in the laws from Eshnunna as well). While both awīlum and muškēnum were free classes, what distinguishes the former is the penalty of talio (i.e. physical punishments, an eye for an eye) for trespasses, while injury to a muskēnum results in a monetary fine (as is the case elsewhere in Mesopotamian law). The awīlum were the leadership of the community, having political authority and special legal protection; in the late second millennium, the term awīlum underwent a semantic shift (=slave).
• Personal liberty is unknown in the pre-modern world. Freedom in Babylonia entails the basis for full participation in the polity, a lifetime of service to the state. All free born men in Babylonia were born with work obligations to the state, quite in line with Mesopotamian religious ideology which frames mankind as being in perpetual servitude to the gods. This obligation could be resolved through a) corvée labour or b) military service. Corvée labour, the obligation to do physical labour for the state for a number of days each month, was seen as a serious burden. Failure to carry out this obligation could result in prison time, and to avoid this, documents show that the free man could hire another person to perform corvée in his place.
• In the first millennium, Babylonian kings may attempt to garner political favor by granting exemptions from labour obligations in select cities, amar-gi4/andurārum. In order to ensure essential work on canals etc. continued, this would require subjugating another city in order to replace the exempted labour force.
• The wardum: a Middle Assyrian proverb reads ‘Man is the shadow of god, and the slave shadow of man.’ It is not easy to define the exact value of wardum across genres, for example, the king is called the wardum of the gods; the basic lexical value entails some sort of servitude, and according to Mesopotamian ideology, all persons are servile. It has been argued that the concept ‘freedom’ itself is anachronistic when applied to the ancient world. At minimal, one can understand evidence from the law codes to be indicative of a distinctly lower class, the wardum: these ‘slaves’ had diminished ‘legal rights’ and entitlements in comparison to non-slaves.
• While slaves could be acquired from foreign lands or in the course of war, more commonly they were acquired in the interior: a parent may sell a child into slavery, or a person may themselves go into slavery to relieve a debt; a person could be enslaved by the court – there are some indications that, in the late period, women could be enslaved for marrying against the wishes of the father. Slaves could be bought and sold, gifted as part of a dowry or inheritance, and their labor could be lent to a creditor in lieu of payments. Slaves could be marked or branded legally identifying them as belonging to an owner or institution.
• Evidence from the late period Egibi archive suggests that slaves were mainly employed in domestic duties around the house, or in a small number of crafts, but that most agricultural work fell to tenant farmers. Slaves were occasionally trained in elite professions: a Neo-Babylonian text read in last years Babylonian dialects course, Ungnad 11, mentions a slave who functioned as a ‘scribe on parchment.’
Law
Radner 2005; Molina 2013
• Sources for law in Babylonia include the ‘law collections’, trial records, letters, sale documents, etc.
• Mesopotamian society itself is quite heterogenous: segments of the population were urban, other were rural; some groups were sedentary while others were pastoral; both state and kin structures coexisted and overlapped.
• Its possible that the oldest judicial authority in the ANE is that of the assembly of elders, an artifact of tribal law. With the onset of the state, and according to the emic view, ultimate judicial authority lay with the gods; however, in practice, judicial power was wielded by the king, who were seen to have been invested with this power by the gods for the purpose of installing order and justice in the land. For the first half of Mesopotamian history there seems to be no meaningful distinction between judicial and state authority. However, this authority was shared with officials of various sorts, and on a municipal level, with city counsels.
• In the first millennium, this was still the case for Assyria where the highest judicial authority continued to be the king. In addition, officials of various sorts and provincial governors could act as judges. However, in Babylon, the professional judge (dayyānum) is attested.
Women in Society
• van die Mieroop 1999 has stated “No historical discipline can take itself seriously today without paying attention to the issue of gender.” The study of gender in Mesopotamian can be divided into different approaches, what may be termed ‘traditional scholarship’ and feminist scholarship, each wave of which has a distinct set of presuppositions: while first wave sought to study women in history, second wave sought to uncover an early matriarchy in Mesopotamia, while third wave seeks to demonstrate that gender was a social construct in ancient societies (van die Mieroop 1999). In terms of theoretical approach then, a dichotomy exists at the level of nature or nurture, biological or social construction, scientific or critical epistemology – rationalist or irrationalist claims.
• Differing theoretical presuppositions result in variant methodologies and variant claims. For one scholar, the projection of the subordinate status of Islamic women onto the Mesopotamian population is a bigoted orientialist assumption; for another, perhaps on the premise that analogy is everywhere the scientist’s tool in mediating the problem of the unknown, this strategy is fair game. Often, compelling evidence one way or another rests on ambiguous data and the fine interpretation of obscure vocabulary – for example, while van die Mieroop 1999 is convinced that the words the notions ‘harem’ and ‘veil’ are red herrings in the Middle Assyrian literature, Stol 2016 is convinced of the validity of these readings.
• Traditional scholarship has generally divided the activity of men to the ‘public sphere’ and women to the ‘private sphere’ and the basis of this division has been taken to be biological (Bahrani 2001). MacGregor’s 2012 SAA volume Beyond Hearth and Home seeks to highlight women’s activity in the public sphere during the Neo-Assyrian period, the work primarily focuses on palace women, temple women and musicians. A problem with the work is that the boundaries of ‘public sphere’ are never clearly defined, and the emic conceptual connection of the house and the palace and temple are well known. The work leaves many open questions. Some claims are more dubious, for example, Assante’s 1999 rejection of “prostitute” as an acceptable translation of KAR.KID/harimtum was largely made on the grounds that, while the KAR.KID/harimtum was clearly associated with sex, there are no records of one being paid; Assante then asserts that these women were instead free, independent women who were also sexually liberated. Problematically, this dearth of information about everyday payments for the professions is the norm rather than the exception and while all sorts of information is available, records of individual payments for i.e. fornication and haircuts are not. The claim has been thoroughly rejects by Cooper in the RlA entry “Prostitution.”
Women’s roles in Mesopotamia are often opaque and subject to interpretational differences. An example is the nature of the KAR.KID often translated ‘prostitute’ about which Julia Assante has argued the KAR.KID was rather a sexually liberated free class of woman.
• While lexical uncertainty and debate serve, if anything, to further the obscurity of women’s situation in Mesopotamia, there seems to be little doubt as the generally subordinate legal status of women. van Dassow 2011 states that women in Mesopotamian were subordinated socially and legally to male custodians. Roth 1988 explains that women were mentioned either as the ‘wife-of-a-man’ or the ‘daughter-of-a-man’ in legal texts, and it is clear that in her view that the frequent adultery penalties in Mesopotamian law codes served mainly to limit the sort of punishment a husband could bring to bear – in other words, fidelity in implicit.
• Women in Mesopotamian sources are sometimes said to be “Invisible” to modern scholarship. We mainly catch glimpses of their livelihood in ‘law codes’, legal documents and administrative texts. Studies in Neo-Assyrian prosopography have shown that only some 7% of recorded names in the textual record are female.