Temple householdsThe administration of two early Old Babylonian temple households from the Diyala
region, of the Sîn-temple in Khafaja and of the temple of Ishtar-Kititum in Ishchali,
demonstrates some significant differences with that of the southern temples. Both
temple households did not own large tracts of land at the outset, but acquired control
over land and labour through unpaid debts. The sanguof the Kititum temple issued
loans together with the god Sîn, who had a temple in a nearby locality. Moreover,
his seal qualified him as a servant of the king rather than of Ishtar-Kititum. Thus,
also in Northern Babylonia, temple households seem to be integrated to some degree
in the centralized royal management.
The gods Shamash, Nanna and Sîn issued numerous loans that cannot be situated
in an archival context. The Assyriological attempts to attribute a charitable rather
than a usurious nature to this practice have not been successful. Interest rates on these
loans could be just as high ( 25 to 33 per cent) as on ‘normal’ loans.
Part of the administration of the Annunitum temple in Sippar-Amnanum has been
recovered from the house of Ur-Utu, the gala-mah of Annunitum during the reign
of Ammi-saduqa, the penultimate ruler of the Old Babylonian dynasty. As observed
above for the temples of Ur, the temple management at this time was supervised by
high ranking priests, such as the gala-mah, but the execution of actual tasks such as
the preparation of offerings and cultivation of the fields, was managed through
entrepreneurs.
Private townsmenMost of the cuneiform tablets from the early period in northern Babylonia document
the activities of private individuals living in the Northern Babylonian towns. In
Sippar, Dilbat, Kish and Kisurra, townspeople sold, leased, inherited and bought
fields, house plots and gardens. Unlike in the south, it was possible to sell fields in
northern Babylonia. Still, in many instances where the context of the sale is well
documented, seller and purchaser appear to be related, or the field is sold to cover
unpaid debts to be redeemed later. Especially the so-called ‘Manania’-archives from
the region of Kish, which cover only one generation, record how real estate sales were
embedded in a context of indebtedness and how the previous owner became a dependant
(slave or lessee) of his creditor. Thus, the real estate market may not have been as
free as the numerous sale documents, kept in the family archives for generations as
title deeds, suggest. Since the agricultural lands often formed the economic basis,
and the house the social basis of the family estate, it could not easily be dispensed
with. From the reign of Hammurabi on, real estate sales gradually disappear from
the textual record and are replaced by lease contracts.
Just as in the south, the well-off townspeople used their assets to give out loans,
for consumptive as well as commercial purposes. When the debtors were unable to
repay their debts, the creditor could accumulate lands and labour force and thus
acquire considerable wealth. However, because of the principle of partitive inheritance
which operated in Babylonia, the estate of a large family could sometimes be dissolved
within a few generations.
— The Old Babylonian economy —