A SKETCH OF BABYLONIAN SOCIETY. 589 



above, as well as from the idea that the country was subject to the 

 gods, on the one side, and from the repeated political revolutions on the 

 other, it results, as a matter of course, that out of the tribal possession 

 of the land three forms of ownership must have developed: (1) Temple 

 ownership; (2) State ownership, and (3) only secondarily, private owner- 

 ship. All three forms are met in the New Babylonian documents, 

 naturally with many variations. 



Temple ownership developed out of the proprietary claim upon the 

 whole territory comprised in the district about the temple. Originally 

 a share of the products was yielded on this account to the deity and, 

 therefore, to his temple. Naturally, in the evolution of things, conflicts 

 of rights must have arisen, and thus, even in the oldest documents as 

 yet in the Sumerian language, we see the kings engaged in regulating 

 the temple revenues. Although gradually a partial conversion of the 

 payments in kind into monetary payments took place the former 

 remained by far the most prevalent, even in the Babylon of Nebuchad- 

 nezzar and the Persians, as the contract tablets show. 1 Since, 

 especially in years of bad harvests and in times of war, the revenues 

 established by the kings yielded but little, a fixed income was early 

 provided, inasmuch as certain pieces of land were conveyed not merely 

 into the theoretical proprietorship but into the actual possession of the 

 temple, in order that from them the expenses of the temple and the 

 priests might be met. 



For the form of State ownership we have only slight indications. 

 If the Assyrian kings restored their possessions to the nobles exiled 

 or imprisoned by the Kaldi, and, vice versa, the Kaldi kings did the 

 same with regard to those exiled by the Assyrians, this restitution 

 might have taken either the form of enfeoffment, of which we have an 

 example in the Merodachbaladan stone of the Berlin Museum, or the 

 form of restitutio in integrum, while it is yet impossible to determine 

 certainly whether State or private ownership was really the form in 

 question. So, in the case of a number of revenues, the question is still 

 open whether we have before us taxes upon private property or rents 

 on account of original State ownership. On the other hand a consid- 

 erable number of documents in proof of genuine private ownership 

 are extant. 



If we consider the three forms of proprietorship from the poiut of 

 view of revenues, it appears that the temples played a double role. If 

 they only took a revenue from certain pieces of ground, they were 

 upon the same footing as the State, which received revenues from the 

 feudal estates, but if they held the estates in actual possession they 

 were analogous to private individuals, who could manage these proper- 

 ties themselves or lease them. 



We thus come to the subject of husbandry, which we may now divide 



1 Thence results the arrangement hy which the temple farmed out the latter 

 revenues. 



