A History of Babylon, 2200 BC - AD 75 (Blackwell History of the Ancient World) by Paul-Alain Beaulieu

Author:Paul-Alain Beaulieu [Beaulieu, Paul-Alain]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781119459118
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

5.3.1 A New Source: The Kudurrus

The Akkadian term kudurru means “heir” as well as “boundary” and also refers to a type of stele, usually made of stone (rarely of clay), roughly ovoid in shape and with a height of up to three feet. Some later examples occur on stone tablets imitating originals in clay. The word kudurru is not the only designation for these objects; other terms occur such as naru or asumittu “stele” and even abnu “stone,” but these are generic terms and kudurru seems to have been more specific to that particular genre. Typically a kudurru is inscribed on a substantial portion of its surface and many have an iconographic section. The inscription records a legal transaction, usually a royal grant of land, less often a tax exemption, and ends with curses against potential violators. In the course of time other types of transactions were recorded on kudurrus, such as royal adjudications and private sales of real estate. There is wide variation in the structure and appearance of the kudurrus, hardly a surprising fact since they range from the fourteenth to the seventh century. Their greatest concentration, however, occurs during the late Kassite and Isin II periods; fewer examples date to the first millennium. Thirty‐two kudurrus from the Kassite period are known. In the past, historians referred to kudurrus as “boundary stones” on the assumption that they were planted in the soil to mark the limits of properties. While the appearance of these monuments may have been inspired by the use of boundary markers in the shape of pegs and stones, it is clear that this was not their primary function. There is concrete evidence that the transactions recorded on kudurrus also existed on clay tablets, making the stone monument legally superfluous. Most kudurrus were in fact probably deposited in temples where they served as iconic guarantees for the transactions. The kudurrus constitute an important source for studying the development of religious iconography since gods appear on them mostly in the form of symbols or emblematic animals, and some kudurrus even bear captions identifying the symbols with divine names. The curse sections sometimes specify that the gods depicted on the stele stand as protectors of the transaction; this is the case in a kudurru from the time of the Kassite king Meli‐shipak (1186–1172): “May all the gods whose names are invoked, whose altars are depicted and whose designs are drawn on this stele, uproot his (i.e. the violator’s) name, seed and offspring.” Some kudurrus also have depictions of the king and the beneficiary of the grant.

Why do kudurrus suddenly appear under the Kassites? Real estate transactions were sometimes recorded on stone monuments in the third millennium and scholars often apply the term kudurru to these artifacts as well (Figure 2.2), but they bear only a distant relation to the later kudurrus, which truly constitute an innovation of the Kassite period. Some have cogently argued that the demise of the state apparatus at the end of Babylon I and

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