Perhaps the least productive plan is to ransack them for illustrations of a theory, or a particular point. When the theory is already well known, as in the case of Roman or mediæval law, such a procedure is justifiable, but when the theory has to be made out, it is wellnigh inexcusable. Some valuable monographs have followed this method, but they can hardly expect to give permanent results. For comparative purposes our material is so new, and so little [pg xv] worked, that it is sheer waste of time to seek for parallels elsewhere until everything is clearly made out to which parallels are to be sought. The whole bulk of material must be read through and classified. Until this is done, some important point may easily be overlooked.
The first attempts at classification will be provisional. A certain amount of overlapping is sure to occur. For example, slave sales obviously form a provisional group. But slaves were sold along with lands or houses. Shall these sales be taken into the group? The sales of lands may be another group. To which group shall we assign the sale of a piece of land and the slaves attached to it? To answer that question we may examine the sales of slaves and the sales of lands to see if either group has peculiarities, the recurrence of which in a sale of land and slaves might decide. But we soon find that a slave was sold exactly like a piece of land or any chattel. The only exception is that certain guarantees are expected with the slave, which differ from those demanded with a piece of land. On the whole, then, the chief group will be “sales,” with subdivisions according to the class of property used. Hence we cannot assume that there was already present to legal consciousness a difference between real and personal property, or in any other sense that a slave was a person. He was a chattel.
The classification which will be adopted is not one that will suit modern legal ideas. It depends on the form of document alone. If two documents have the same type of formula, they will be grouped together. A future revision will, no doubt, assign to many of these a place in modern schemes. But it is very easy to be premature in assigning an ancient document to modern categories.
The groups will be subdivided according to subject-matter. The order of the groups will be determined by the greater or less complexity of the documents. It is best to [pg xvi] take those first which can be easily made out. The experience gained in discussing them will be of great service in dealing with more complicated cases. The reader must not, however, suppose that no obscurities will remain. Subsequent investigation will lead to redistribution. Each such revision will, however, bring us nearer to sound results.
One of the most interesting and instructive methods of dealing with a large collection of documents is to group together the transactions, distributed over a number of years, of one man, or of a single family. This method has often been adopted and makes most fascinating reading.
Thus, M. V. Revillout, in the appendix to M. E. Revillout's lectures entitled Les obligations en droit egyptien, under the title of Une famille des commerçants, discussed the interrelations of a large number of tablets published by Strassmaier. These had a special connection, being found, and practically kept, together. They are concerned chiefly with the business transactions of three persons and their descendants. The three men do not seem to have been related, but to have become partners. The first transaction in which they are concerned is an equitable division of property which they had held in common. They and their descendants lived side by side in Larsa and gradually extended their possessions on every side. They were neighbors to two wealthy landowners from whom and from whose descendants they gradually acquired lands and houses. Especially did two brothers, sons of one of the original three, buy up, piece by piece, almost all the property of these two neighboring families. Further, in acquiring a piece of land, they seem to have come into possession of the deeds of sale, or leases, of that plot, which had been executed by previous owners. Thus, we can, in some cases, follow the history of a plot of land during several reigns.
Such a collection of documents probably did not come [pg xvii] from the public archives, but from the muniment-chest of a private family, or of a firm of traders. That duplicates of some of these tablets should have been found in other collections, points either to the collections having been purchased from native dealers, who put together tablets from all sources, or to the duplicates having been deposited in public archives, as a kind of registration of title.
In Assyrian times the transactions of the great Rîmâni-Adadi, the chief charioteer and agent of Ashurbânipal, who for some thirteen years appears almost yearly, as buyer or seller, lender or borrower, on some forty tablets, may serve as a further example,[1] or we may note how Baḥiânu appears, chiefly as a corn lender, year after year, for thirty-three years, on some twenty-four tablets.[2]
For the Second Empire of Babylonia, Professor J. Kohler and Dr. F. E. Peiser have given some fine examples of this method. Thus, for the bankruptcy of Nabû-aplu-iddin,[3] they show that the creditors distrained upon the bankrupt's property and found a buyer for most of it in a great Neriglissar, afterwards King of Babylon. The first creditor was paid in full, another received about half of the amount due to him, a third about the same, while a fourth obtained less than a quarter of what was owed him. They also follow out the fortunes of the great banking firm of Egibi[4] for fully a century. The sketch, of course, is not complete, and can only be made so by a prolonged search through thousands of documents in different museums; but it is intensely interesting and written with wonderful insight and legal knowledge. Another example is the family, or guild, of the priests of Gula.[5] This is less fully made out but most valuable, as far as it goes. In both cases a genealogy is given extending over many generations.
Later still, the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, in the ninth volume of Cuneiform Texts, gives a collection of the business documents of one firm, “Murashu Sons, of Nippur,” in the reign of Artaxerxes I. Here we have to do with a family deed-chest, a collection of documents found together and fortunately kept together.