Ed. Cuq in La Propriété foncière en Chaldée gave a new view of the meaning of these documents and the significance of their first appearing in the Kassite period. It will be seen from the titles given in the above works that no complete unanimity prevails as to their nature and purpose.
We may now turn back to the class of texts usually called contracts.
The Assyrian empire has not yielded much of this class of document, before the time of Sargon II, B.C. 785-722. A number of texts have been reported in the Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin as found at Asshur by the German excavators there, which date from times both early and late. The publication of these texts will doubtless soon be achieved and add greatly to our knowledge. The treatment in Assyria seems to be largely reminiscent of that of Babylonia under the First Dynasty, but there are wide divergences doubtless due to the foreign elements in the Assyrian population. We are not yet possessed of sufficient material to assign the changes to their true causes, but we know enough to be sure that they were not on the whole due to contemporary developments in Babylonia.
In Assyrian Deeds and Documents relating to the transfer of Property, in three volumes, by C. H. W. Johns, published in 1898-1901 (Deighton, Bell & Co., Cambridge, 3 vols.), practically all the material of this class in the British Museum then catalogued was edited. These tablets apparently all came from Nineveh. There are now many more similar tablets in the British Museum listed in the Supplement to the Catalogue. Recently in Assyrische Rechtsurkunden von J. Kohler und A. Ungnad (Leipzig, Ed. Pfeiffer, 1913), a series of transliterations and translations have been commenced which will form a key to the whole, including many other texts since published.
It was on these texts that J. Oppert formed his views given in Das Assyrische Landrecht, and in Le droit de retrait lignager à Ninive, see p. [72].
V. Scheil published in his Notes d’épigraphie in the Recueil de Travaux, xx, note xl (1898), pp. 202-5, four tablets which possibly did not come from Nineveh. I republished the texts as nos. 779-82 in my Deeds and Documents above. The first is discussed by Meissner as Eine assyrische Schenkungsurkunde in the Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1903, pp. 103-5, where he points out that my no. 619 is another like text. Here Adi-mati-ilu and other property were given to a son who was to take a double portion and divide the rest with his brothers.
F. E. Peiser in the Orientalistische Litteraturzeitung, 1905, cols. 130-4, gave Ein neuer assyrischer Kontrakt, V. Scheil in the same journal for 1904, col. 70, and in the Recueil de Travaux, xxiv, note lxii, p. 24, pointed out others, while in Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler, vol. i, nos. 84-111, A. Ungnad published several more from Kannu’ and Kerkûk. S. Schiffer discussed many of these as Keilschriftliche Spuren der in der zweiten Hälfte des 8. Jahrhunderts von den Assyrern nach Mesopotamien deportierten Samarier, a Beiheft to Orientalistische Litteraturzeitung (Berlin, W. Peiser, 1907), with which may be compared an article in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1908, pp. 107-15, 137-41, on The Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, by C. H. W. Johns. In an article Aus dem Louvre, F. E. Peiser published in the Orientalistische Litteraturzeitung, 1903, cols. 192-200, a new collation of no. 1,141 in my Deeds and Documents, which had been formerly treated by Place, Oppert, and Strassmaier; and an edition of another text of this class. The new Supplement to the Catalogue of the Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection in the British Museum, by L. W. King (London, British Museum, 1914), shows that many more such texts await publication, and there are others in the Museums in England and America.
This class of document was early known for the times of the Neo-babylonian Empire, and thousands of the so-called contracts have been published down to the century before the Christian era.
J. Oppert began the task of publishing and deciphering contracts, for which his legal training as well as his philological learning especially fitted him. His work may be gathered from the bibliography in the second volume of the Beiträge zur Assyriologie, pp. 523-56. His great effort was Documents juridiques de l’Assyrie et de la Chaldée (Paris, Maisonneuve, 1877), but he continued to deal with contracts up to his death. Here as elsewhere comparison of fresh material continually brought new light.
A number of such tablets were copied by T. G. Pinches(?) for the fifth volume of Inscriptions of Western Asia (London, British Museum, 1909, plates lxvii, lxviii), on which Oppert built his determination of Babylonian measures. J. N. Strassmaier, in 1855, published Die babylonischen Inschriften im Museum zu Liverpool nebst anderen aus der Zeit von Nebukadnezar bis Darius (Leiden, J. Brill).