ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 185 
of land being divided by a sort of council which was held periodi- 
cally. In Babylonia, when land was leased, it was leased by a 
court held, not in the guest chamber, for they do not seem to have 
had one, but in the gate of the city. These elders sat, as in the case 
of Boaz, and decided the question. Land was leased in this way. 
The most prominent person was the scribe, who was the same as 
the khateeb here; he wrote down a list of the lands. Then as, 
to village communities, we have a distinct trace of it in Babylonia 
—certainly at the time of the captivity and even much earlier, in 
the time of Hsar-Haddon and Sennacherib, we find that the 
wealthy individuals paid their tithe—and even the King—to the 
Temple; he usually paid it in gold. Only a few days ago, I 
copied a list in which a number of villages paid their tithe in a 
body, and were taxed as if they paid individually. Then, again, 
I noticed a subject of interest with regard to the plough: it 
comes in with something later in the paper. The two signs used 
to represent the plough are derived, according to M. Briinnow 
from a word that means to make a burrow or a scratch with a 
graving tool. The word sadeh, in the Hebrew, has, apparently, a 
different meaning to the word used in the Hebrew inscriptions. 
The word for “ open country” is zuza, that which is spread out 
It has almost exactly the same meaning as the distinction you 
hear constantly drawn between town and country land; because I 
find a man saying in a mortgage which we have, on which he 
borrowed a sum of money, “all that I possess in town and the 
open country, I give as security.” Then there is another point 
with regard to the rope or measuring line; the suggestion of the 
author is ingenious, but I must say that I am not quite convinced 
by it yet. Certainly, we do know that land was allotted out in 
Babylonia by the asslu, which means a rope or cord; but I do not 
find much trace of it. 
Now, there is another point with regard to two persons having 
land cultivated for them, namely, the scribe and the carpenter. 
In Babylonia there was another individual, who was not quite so 
popular as either of those persons, who had land cultivated for 
him, and that was the tax collector. He was, moreover, bound to 
be provided by the village with a donkey on which to go his round 
to collect the taxes. There are numerous other points to which 
I might refer—one is blood affinity. I think the author would 
gain a good deal of information if he were to read Professor 
