'The Crowns of Their bābtum': On Wives, Wards, and Witnesses

摘要

BM 80989 is a late Old Babylonian tablet that documents the receipt of silver weighing less than a teaspoon of salt, for the performance of ilku-work contracted out to an extended family; the receipt was "witnessed" by the crowns of two gods. Both contracts for hired labor and the use of divine emblems in legal contexts are well known from Old Babylonian sources, and our text differs little from parallel texts in these broad contours. But the tablet introduces variations on practice which prompt new questions about the relationships between wives and families, households and neighborhoods, temples and wards, and between gods, their symbols, and men. Two features in particular complicate the basic subject matter: one, the position of wives as lessors for brothers-in-law; two, the appearance of divine emblems (in this case, crowns of ?ama? and Marduk) in the company of other gods as witnesses. Let us first look at the text: