L

The

American Historical Review

LAND TENURE IN THE ANCIENT ORIENT

AND tenure in the European Middle Ages was early studied by scientific historians, and the establishment of its fundamental importance for the understanding of the economic and social history was one of their greatest triumphs. It was not long before it was recognized that the manorial system of the Middle Ages was no innovation, that it had evolved naturally from the land system of the Roman Empire. In turn, this was traced back to the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Within the last century, a vast number of records in the cuneiform and hieroglyphic writings have been discovered, published, and translated. Parallels, or more correctly, antecedents to the better known land systems of the West were soon detected, and there were even found anticipations of the more truly feudal system of Europe in certain periods of Egyptian and Babylonian history. Orientalists were not slow in pointing out these remarkable similarities, and some went so far as to employ in their translations the familiar terminology of the European manor. Innumerable papyri from Egypt and rarer inscriptions from the other Hellenistic kingdoms showed definite lines of communication between the relatively scanty native Egyptian records and those of the older countries of Western Asia and the records from Europe proper.

With these facts so clearly established, it was natural that the view should prevail that the manorial system was the typical land system of the ancient Orient and that it was the direct ancestor of the better known tenures of the West in later times. The second assumption is undoubtedly correct, and further detailed investigation will surely discover new links between East and West. The first assumption is true in part, but only in part. Assyria, the one country whose records have been studied in their entirety from this point of view, proves that the problem can not be solved in this easy fashion.

The problem will not be solved by the present hurried survey. Many detailed investigations must be carried on before more than a tentative solution can be presented. The humbler purpose of this article is to urge the importance of this subject to the students of land problems in general, to indicate the lines along which it is believed investigation should proceed, and to illustrate this procedure by certain examples taken from the abundant mass of material. Suggestions from neighboring territory will not be ignored, but the data from the ancient Orient will be studied by themselves. In particular, the use of terminology proper to other fields will be avoided as far as possible, since their employment tends to read into the subject ideas which may not actually be there.1

Theoretically, at least, the investigation should begin with that second phase of the neolithic Orient, when to pottery and polished stone implements there were added the cultivation of the soil and the domestication of animals. Written records are of course entirely absent, and we can only guess at the conditions under which man, or rather woman, tilled the soil. Neolithic graves prove the possession of private property, and this fact would lead us to suspect that there was private ownership in land as well. We can also call upon analogy with the primitive peoples of to-day, for among them we find examples of land held in common, land belonging to the chief, land consecrated to religion, and land assigned to individuals for a year or in more permanent tenure. Some such conditions we may assume to have been behind the earliest historical land systems.

By the dawn of written history, city states of some size had been formed. We can trace their growth most clearly in Babylonia, whose unification takes place in the full light of written history, but there is plenty of evidence that a similar development immediately preceded Egyptian unity under the First Dynasty. Now and then we have hints that similar conditions may have obtained in Elam, in Syria, and in Asia Minor. The land had already come, in whole or in part, into the control of the state. To be more exact, it had come into the hands of the city god, but, since the ruler was the vicegerent of the god on earth, it was the ruler who enjoyed actual possession. Some

1 This paper was read at Ann Arbor, Dec. 29, 1925, at a joint meeting of the American Historical Association and the Agricultural History Society. It was again read at the meeting of the Middle West Branch of the American Oriental Society at Chicago, Mar. 19, 1926. Both Orientalists and historians have contributed valuable suggestions which have been incorporated in the revised paper. It is a pleasure to state that Professor D. D. Luckenbill, of the University of Chicago, authority on Babylonian and Assyrian economic history, has expressed complete agreement with the general view herein presented, though with no necessary agreement in individual details.

of the land he may have granted to his nobles for favors received or to be given, but the vast mass was crown land. It was cultivated by serfs who paid to the god rent and not taxes; this rent was paid in kind, and in turn the ruler paid the salaries of his subordinates in grain, so that the measure of grain almost became the equivalent of coin in bookkeeping. Only in the case of the cities may there have been a more free tenure, though this is by no means certain for the earliest period. Thousands of bookkeeping records from Babylonia establish the accuracy of this picture.2

This system of land tenure proved peculiarly adapted to the Nile valley and was continued throughout the ages. It was the basis for the wealth of the Fourth Dynasty and it made possible the erection of the pyramids. In the period of decline which followed, it broke down to the extent of transferring the rights of the crown to the feudal princes who defied the central power, but the serf benefitted not at all by the change. It was in full force again under the New Empire, to which belongs the well-known story of Joseph, whose wisdom is made by the Hebrew writer the cause of its introduction. Thousands of papyri from the Macedonian and Roman and early Arab periods have made it familiar to every student of agricultural history, and it has left its traces in the Egypt of to-day. It has made the typical Egyptian a peasant. Yet, it should be noted, there is some evidence for a land-holding middle class from at least the Middle Kingdom and onward."

When the Shumerian in Babylonia began to be supplanted by the Semite, fresh from the nomadic life of the Arabian desert, we find our first certain examples of tenure in fee simple. Manishtusu, one of the greatest monarchs of the Agade dynasty, could not confiscate land without compensation. As witnessed by his great stele, he must pay the owners at the current price or must grant other lands of equivalent value. The business documents likewise reflect the change. Holdings of the citizens of the towns were not confined to houses within the towns themselves but also included lands in the outskirts. All their property could be bought and sold, provided only that the transaction was properly recorded, sealed, and witnessed. Church and state had begun to separate, and the possessions of the

2 Cf. H. de Genouillac, Tablettes Sumériennes Archaïques (Paris, 1909).

3 Gen. 47: 23 ff.

J. H. Breasted, History of Egypt (New York, 1912), pp. 44, 84.

5 Ibid., pp. 169, 237.

J. de Morgan, Délégation en Perse, Mémoires (Paris, 1900 ff.), I., opp. p. 142; V. Scheil, II. 1 ff. Cf. F. Steinmetzer, Beitr. z. Assyriologie, VIII. 2; A. T. Olmstead, Amer. Jour. Semitic Languages, XXXIII. 316.

temples continued to increase, until the priesthoods dominated the economic life, through their great estates, their training of the scribes, and their issuance of coined money, bearing the head of the local god as witness to its correct weight and fineness. The code of Hammurabi, based on earlier Shumerian codes, shows the system in full force.'

With the conquest of the Babylonian alluvium by half-civilized hordes of Kashshites from the east, there resulted a remarkable parallel to the conditions of the European Middle Ages. In each case, on the basis of an earlier manorial system, a definitely feudal system was imposed in a period of political disturbance, when the royal power was at its weakest. Nearly a hundred Kashshite boundary stones have come down to us. They contain royal charters, granting huge tracts of land to more than half independent nobles, and with as careful a statement of the rights and immunities which went with them as can be read in any medieval charter. They are full of technical terms, especially of those dealing with taxation, and exact interpretation is still in the future.R

In its general outlines, the Assyrian system of land tenure was very similar to that of Babylonia, from which it was in large part derived. Since it has been presented, with as complete a view as the evidence at hand will permit, in the writer's History of Assyria," a brief sketch may here suffice.

For sources, we have over a thousand bookkeeping documents, the larger part of an agricultural nature, a few letters which discuss. farming conditions, a few incidental references in the royal annals, the charters to the nobles and to the imperial free cities, above all, the Harran Census. Each section of the census deals with a family group. Since the father is named first, it would appear that these holdings were hereditary. Then follows the status of the head of the family, irrigator, husbandman, vineyardist, shepherd; his sons are listed by name, his daughters are counted. The number of his slaves is given and then his holdings, reckoned by the imer, the amount of land that could be sown with an ass-load of seed.

The soil of the great estates, which were particularly numerous in Mesopotamia, was cultivated by serfs. In the sales of land, they are regularly mentioned by name, and in the same sentence with the live

7 V. Scheil, Dél. en Perse, Mém., IV. 11 ff.; R. F. Harper, The Code of Hammurabi (Chicago, 1904).

8 Full bibliography of these charters, A. T. Olmstead, Amer. Jour. Semitic Languages, XXXVI. 120 ff.; the most important single collection is that by L. W. King, Babylonian Boundary Stones (London, 1912).

9 A. T. Olmstead, History of Assyria (New York, 1923).

stock. They could not leave land or master, but they might buy additional land, stock, or equipment. They probably paid a third of their income to their master.

In addition to payment of rent, regularly in kind, the serf, often a deported captive, owed numerous services to the state. The land unit was the "bow ", which must furnish the military unit, a bowman and his shield-bearer. Serf as well as slave must also serve the state for economic purposes. Peasants must work the crown lands, keep up roads and canals, and assist in building government structures. References to "task work" are frequent in the letters to the king, and once we hear the voice of the ancient lowly, "the task work is heavy, heavy upon us". The peasant's daughters must serve "king's maidship", as, for example, in the great weaving establishments in the royal capitals.

The Assyrian might be a fierce warrior, but he had learned the great truth that the real foundation of the state is the farmer, and he treated his serfs accordingly. A system much like that of our working the farms on shares was normal. Our largest single group of bookkeeping documents from the royal archives consists of the records of loans advanced by the master to finance the harvest.

In all ages and throughout all countries, not excepting our own, the greatest problem of the farmer has been the securing of loans for his seasonal necessities without recourse to the usurer. The Assyrian landlord showed strangely enlightened self-interest in saving his tenant from this fate. His loans were not in accord with the usual practice, which results in the enslaving of tenant to master by an ever mounting and unpaid interest. The Assyrian landlord actually refused to demand interest at all if the loan was paid when the harvest was in. In fact, he actually lost money if grain were loaned, for he made his loan when grain was dear and received it when it was cheap. Only the careless and the thriftless, who did not meet his loan at harvest, paid interest and then it was high enough.

The Assyrian has been given a bad reputation. Certainly he did not deserve it from his treatment of his peasants. The fact is that the peasant was relatively well off when Assyria ruled the world. His successors did not follow the same enlightened policy, and in the later documents from Babylonia we can watch the serf sink to the level of the slave and lose his identity in a separate and more privileged class.

Our documents come almost entirely from court circles and therefore deal largely with crown lands or with the estates held by the nobles. But there are sufficient references to the free farmer and