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5.3 Adoption
According to a broken adoption and inheritance text from ›ana (see
6.2.1.2 below), an adoption could be dissolved with a statement by
the adopted son to his parents: “You are not my father” or “You
are not my mother.”^104 The penalty in this text, however, seems
unusually harsh: the head of the adopted son who breaks the con-
tract “will be smeared with hot asphalt” (a.esir 2 ud.du.a emmam qaqqassu
ikkappar),^105 and he will pay a penalty in silver. As the adopting cou-
ple already has a (presumably biological) son who will follow the
adopted son in rank, and because the penalty for breaking the con-
tract includes a payment in silver, it would seem that, as in many
contemporary Nuzi adoptions, the function of this adoption was to
enable the transfer of family property to an adopted son in exchange
for future financial support.- P I
6.1 Tenure
There is some evidence for royal land grants made to reward officers
or ensure their fealty, and as such they are comparable to royal
grants from earlier periods. During the Kassite Dynasty, however,
the king could grant land to an individual as a permanent holding,
a grant that no one, not even a future king, could reverse or encroach
upon in any way. This innovation in land tenure occasioned the
innovation of a form of public documentation, the Entitlement narû
(see 1.2 above). The terms of the grant—as well as fierce impreca-
tions against its violation—were inscribed upon stone monuments
embellished with sculpted divine emblems and placed in the temple.
In this way, the monument commemorated the recipient’s entitle-
ment to the holding and protected his right to pass it down to his
heirs. These monuments were also used to commemorate acquisi-
tion of sources of perpetual income other than land, such as tem-
ple prebends and exemptions from tax and labor obligations(^104) Presumably parallel statements by the adoptive parents, which are not pre-
served, also would suffice to dissolve the relationship.
(^105) RBC 779 (= Podany, et al., “Adoption.. .”).
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