being in the relationship between two parties engaging in a transaction, a record that
surpassed the limits of time, space, and social divisions (cf. Postgate 1984 : 15 ). While
such documents were not mandatory to make a transaction legal, it is clear that their
existence was a safeguard against accusations that ownership was illegal. In the case
cited here, the women could prove they owned their freedom. Some scholars argue that
documents were merely an aide-mémoirethat was accidental to the transaction (e.g.,
Wilcke 2003 : 76 ), but the early history of such records written in Sumerian suggests
that they were considered as important and valuable as they are today. In that sense,
the Sumerian contribution to the history of legal institutions was perhaps more crucial
than Hammurabi’s.
No private legal documents appear in the earliest corpus of tablets from the late
Uruk period, and throughout the Early Dynastic period they remain very rare. The
earliest were all found in a secondary archaeological context or out of context
altogether, and dating them relies on paleographic and iconographic criteria with a
large margin of error. They are special documents because they were written on stone
monuments, mostly integrated in a sculpted relief scene (Gelb, Steinkeller, and
Whiting 1991 ). Probably the oldest are the so-called Blau monuments (Aruz 2003 : 39 ),
which seem to date to c. 3000 – 2900. The Ushumgal stele (Aruz 2003 : 53 ) and the
“Figure aux plumes” (Orthmann 1975 : pl. 75 ) likely date to c. 2800. They all contain
sculpted depictions of various individuals and record multiple transactions involving
real estate. The “Figure aux plumes” combines the legal document with the difficult text
of a hymn to the god Ningirsu (Wilcke 1995 ). Only from c. 2600 onward do records
on clay appear as well, but not at the exclusion of stone monuments until the twenty-
first century. The most elaborate of these monuments is the obelisk of Manishtushu –
although written in the Old Akkadian language it is part of the same tradition – which
records the king’s acquisition of 3 , 420 hectares of land from eight groups of sellers in
northern Babylonia (Westenholz 1999 : 44 – 45 ). The monumentality of the object,
covered with exquisitely carved cuneiform signs and without a sculpted scene, made
it so valuable that 1 , 100 years after its erection it still stood somewhere in Babylonia
visible to the raiding Elamites who took it as booty to Susa. Even if these stone
monuments may contain abbreviated copies of records on clay, as some scholars assert
(Wilcke 2003 : 26 ), the care and effort devoted to establishing them shows that the
contracts were highly regarded items. This suggests that contracts were a crucial
element in transactions. That was especially true for those involving real estate.
Although we cannot document this in the third millennium, we know that in the early
second millennium an owner ideally would hold all records of earlier sales, exchanges,
and inheritances to provide evidence for the legitimacy of his or her ownership of the
property (Charpin 1986 ; Janssen, Gasche, and Tanret 1994 ). In the twenty-first century
Ur III period, sale documents became more common and were generally written on
clay tablets. Real estate (houses and orchards) remained the main object of the
transactions, but also sales of humans and animals were recorded (Steinkeller 1989 ).
The Sumerian invention of a record with legal value should be seen as a seminal
contribution to intellectual history. Henceforth, legal challenges could be settled on the
basis of inanimate and unchanging testimony. In early Mesopotamian history, such
records never became mandatory and many transactions took place in front of
witnesses and involved an oath before gods and king. The fact that oaths and witnesses
are regularly mentioned in contracts shows that the arrangements were not exclusive.
–– Marc Van De Mieroop ––