From these regulations it will be seen that the owner of land in Babylonia under the later Kassite kings, unless granted special exemption, was liable to furnish forced labour for public works both to the state and to his local district; he had to supply grazing and pasture for the flocks and herds of the king and the governor, and to pay various taxes and tithes on land, irrigation-water, and crops. We have already noted the prevalence of similar customs under the First Dynasty,[73] and it is clear that the successive conquests to which the country had been subjected, and its domination by a foreign race, had not to any appreciable extent affected the life and customs of the people nor even the general character of the administrative system.
On one subject the boundary-stones throw additional light, which is lacking at the period of the First Dynasty, and that is the old Babylonian system of land tenure. They suggest that the lands, which formed the subject of royal grants during the Kassite period, were generally the property of the local bîtu, or tribe.[74] In certain cases the king actually purchased the land from the bîtu in whose district it was situated, and, when no consideration was given, we need merely assume that it was requisitioned by royal authority. The primitive system of tribal or collective proprietorship, which is attested by the Obelisk of Manishtusu,[75] undoubtedly survived into the Kassite period, when it co-existed with the system of private ownership, as it had doubtless done at the time of the West-Semitic kings. The bîtu must often have occupied an extensive area, split up into separate districts or groups of villages. It had its own head, the bêl bîti, and its own body of local functionaries, who were quite distinct from the official and military servants of the state. In fact, agricultural life in Babylonia during the earlier periods must have presented many points of analogy to such examples of collective proprietorship as may be seen in the village communities of India at the present day. As the latter system has survived the political changes and revolutions of many centuries, so it is probable that the tribal proprietorship in Babylonia was slow to decay.
The principal factor in its disintegration was undoubtedly the policy, pursued by the West-Semitic and Kassite conquerors, of settling their own officers and more powerful adherents on estates throughout the country. Both these periods thus represent a time of transition, during which the older system of land tenure gradually gave way in face of the policy of private ownership, which for purely political reasons was so strongly encouraged by the crown. There can be no doubt that under the West-Semitic kings, at any rate from the time of Hammurabi onwards, the policy of confiscation was rarely resorted to. And even the earlier rulers of that dynasty, since they were of the same racial stock as a large proportion of their new subjects, would have been the more inclined to respect tribal institutions which may have found a parallel in their land of origin. The Kassites, on the other hand, had no such racial associations to restrain them, and it is significant that the kudurrus were now for the first time introduced, with their threatening emblems of divinity and their imprecatory clauses. At first employed to guard the rights of private ownership, often based on high-handed requisition by the king, they were afterwards retained for transfers of landed property by purchase. In the Neo-Babylonian period, when the boundary-stones recorded long series of purchases by means of which the larger landed estates were built up, the imprecations and symbols had become to a great extent conventional survivals.
But that period was still far distant, and the vicissitudes the country was to pass through were not conducive to security of tenure, whether the property were held under private or collective ownership. We have seen that Assyria, as early as the thirteenth century, had succeeded in capturing and sacking Babylon, and, according to one tradition, had ruled the city for seven years. She was shortly to renew her attempts to subjugate the southern kingdom; but it was Elam, Babylon's still older foe, that brought the long and undistinguished Kassite Dynasty to an end.
[1] Proof that the Aryans were horse-keepers may be seen in the numerous Iranian proper names which include asva (aspa), "horse," as a component; see Justi, "Iran. Namenbuch," p. 486, and cf. Meyer, "Geschichte," I., ii., p. 579.
[2] It is on a text of that period that we find the first mention of the horse in antiquity; cf. Ungnad, "Orient. Lit.-Zeit.," 1907, col. 638 f., and King, "Journ. of Hellenic Studies," XXXIII., p. 359. A reference to one also occurs in a letter of the early Babylonian period (cf. "Cun. Texts in the Brit. Mus.," IV., pl. 1), but, to judge from the writing, this is probably rather later than the time of Hammurabi. It is immediately after the Kassite period that we have evidence of the adoption of the horse as a divine symbol, doubtless that of a deity introduced by the Kassites; see Plate XXII., opposite p. 254.
[3] Some First Dynasty tablets record the issue of rations to certain Kassites, who were obviously employed as labourers, probably for getting in the harvest (cf. Ungnad, "Beitr. zur Assyr.," VI., No. 5. p. 22); and in a list of proper names of the same period (cf. "Cun. Texts," VI., pl. 23) a Kassite man, (awîl) ṣâbum Kashshû, bears the name Warad-Ibari, perhaps a Semitic rendering of an original Kassite name.
[4] Cf. Ingnad, "Vorderas. Schriftdenkmäler," VII., pl. 27, No. 64.
[5] See above, p. 195 f.