A SKETCH OF BABYLONIAN SOCIETY. 593 



to antagonism between plain and city, between pasture and agricul- 

 tural country, and which were then reflected in the political intrigues 

 according as individual parties represented one or the other interest. 

 And it is clear, further, that with the peculiar growth of temple owner- 

 ship — as I have developed it above out of the idea of proprietary claim 

 upon the soil — antagonisms must have grown up between the priests 

 or representatives of the interests of the temples and the kings as 

 representatives of the interests of the state. Only by means of this 

 insight into its material condition does the history of Babylon, at the 

 time of the dynasty of Sargon, for instance, become intelligible. 



I have already, above, emphasized the fact that the cultivation of 

 the laud must have been a very intensive one, We see this from pic- 

 tures which show how water was raised from the canals onto the land 

 by means of hydraulic machines ; and we can draw this conclusion from 

 the syllabaries published in the second volumne of the London work of 

 inscriptions, which deal with the various phases of agriculture. Finally 

 we gather the same knowledge from the data of the lists which, drawn 

 up by the temple officials, show what amount was to be raised in taxes 

 alone from the several tracts of ground. These tracts themselves were 

 distinguished according to the kind of cultivation ; those where the 

 clods were broken with the hoe were from this called aggullattu — that 

 is, a tool which Tiglatk-Pileser I, for example, had used on the con- 

 struction of roadways in the Armenian highlands. Another kind of 

 tool after which tracts of land were named was the marru, written 

 gish mar — that is, the ideogram for wood, plus the ideogram mar, which 

 is applied to a kind of wagon. Unfortunately the meaning of the word 

 can not yet be ascertained with precision. While marru, in the archi- 

 tectural inscription, is taken by some to mean scoop or bucket, others 

 find in it the meaning wagon tongue. In some of the contracts marru 

 certainly means a kind of vessel. It might not be impossible that there 

 were two meanings in the word: (1) that of the vessel, which would 

 then be referred to in the contracts, as well as in the architectural 

 inscriptions; (2) also that of an implement which might perhaps find 

 employment in transportation as well as in agriculture. I imagine it 

 as a primitive kind of cart or dray, and consider it not impossible that 

 by putting in a plowshare a plow might also have been made from it. 

 Further, lands were designated as zaqpu to be derived from zaqaf, if 

 they were planted with date palms, as pi shulpi, if bordering on water 

 and swampy, as ipinnu, if watered with the water wheel, and as taptu, 

 of which the exact signification as yet eludes definition. Especially in 

 Babylonia the idea of fallow land appears to be lacking, which occurs 

 quite frequently in the Assyrian contracts. Whether here the land 

 actually was or could have been continuously cultivated, without fixed 

 rotation and without pause, I leave undecided. 



The individual tracts of land were not computed according to meas- 

 urements of pure plain geometry, like building plots, but according to 

 SM 98 38 



