The value of a slave varied much with age, accomplishments, sex, etc. The Code avoids the question by awarding ‘slave for slave’ (§§ 219; 231), ‘half his price’ (§§ 199, 220). A. maidservant was worth twenty shekels of silver (§ 214), her unborn babe two shekels (§ 213). In contemporary docu- ments a male slave sold for as little as six shekels or as much as twenty. A female slave might fetch as little as four and a half, or, with a babe, as much as ninety-four shekels.
The reward for restoring a fugitive to his master (§ 17), or for curing a slave (§§ 217, 223), was two shekels of silver, evidently calculated as one- tenth of the ordinary value. This value of twenty shekels remained constant as the average to the times of the Second Babylonian Empire.
vi. CLASS LEGISLATION A FEATURE OF THE CoDE.—A distinctive feature of the Code is its class legislation. Not only are the aristocrat, the commoner, and the slave treated separately, but the Code legislates separately for certain classes of the community.
1. The first class are feudal landowners. hold lands of the crown by service. rid sdbé and b@iru, are difficult to
They Their names, translate, be-
cause we have no modern officials whose functions exactly correspond to theirs. (a) For the first we propose ‘levy-master.” The ‘levy - master’ was over the corvée. He had to make up the local quota for the army, or for forced labour. On the former side he might answer to the field-cornet, commandant, pressgang officer, Feldwebel, Stattver- treter; and, on the other, to the ganger on public works. He may have had other duties, such as the maintenance of local order, but these chiefly appear in the letters of the time (see King’s Letters of Hammurabi, under ‘ rida,’ iii. p. 290). To their gangs were condemned fugitive slaves, if unclaimed (B? 419). :
The king in various letters orders the exemption of temple bakers, royal shepherds or herdsmen, and patésis from the iékuw, or ‘duty,’ of these officers. Further, it is certain that on some occasions this duty was military service, on others public works. It is not, however, clear that we have always a class exemption.
The Code fixes their status very clearly in some respects. They might be sent on ‘the king’s way,’ perhaps a term for a military expedition, but probably including any royal business. It was a capital offence not to go. To send a hired sub- stitute involved death, and the substitute took over the appointment (§ 26). For a magistrate to allow such personation was punished by death also (§ 33). If such an officer was captured abroad, and there was bought by a Babylonian slave-dealer, he had, on his return, to be ransomed from his own means, failing that, by the temple treasury of his town, failing that, by the State (§ 32). But his holding could not be sold for the purpose. It consisted of land, house, garden, and stock given him by the king, as well as a salary, and could not be sold, pledged, or exchanged (§ 34). The penalty for its alienation was that it had to be returned, and the buyer, lender, or exchanger lost what he had given for it. The officer could not be oppressed by the governor, neither robbed, defrauded of salary, let out on hire, nor wronged in court, on pain of death (§ 34). The officer could not leave his hold- ing to his wife or daughter, nor any part of it (§ 38). He had, of course, full power over his own acquired property (§ 39). He could name his son as locum tenens in his absence, if capable of discharging the duties of his office, which therefore were not solely military. If his son could not take the duty, being a child, one-third of the estate was sequestered to the child’s mother for his mainten- ance, and a locum tenens put in by royal authority. To secure the estate from dilapidation, the Jocum tenens acquired a prescriptive right to it, if the absentee was away three years or more. This held good only if the absentee had been a neglectful holder. In any case, one year’s absence did not invalidate his claim to resume it on his return.
(6) In nearly every case the 6@’ iru is associated with this officer. The term means simply ‘ catcher,’ and is used of fishermen and hunters alike. In contemporary documents it seems always to be used of fishermen. Perhaps they, too, were a privi- leged class, as being necessary to the provision of food for the palace. It appears that they had their special fisheries reserved in each district, and were not allowed to poach on other fisheries (King, Letters, p.121f.). But it isnot quite clear that the b@ iru, or ‘catcher,’ may not have been, like the old ‘catchpole,’ a sort of constable. He could, like the ‘levy-master,’ be sent ‘on the king’s way,’ might be captured abroad, held the same sort of estate, could make the same arrangements as to his son’s taking his duty. He is not expressly exempted from the governor’s oppressions, but surely was not meant to be at his mercy. This rather goes to prove that dWirw is almost a synonym for rid sdbé.
CODE OF HAMMURABI
CODE OF HAMMURABI
591