collections having been
purchased from native dealers, who put together tablets from all sources,
or to the duplicates having been deposited in public archives, as a kind
of registration of title.

In Assyrian times the transactions of the great Rimani-Adadi, the chief
charioteer and agent of Ashurbanipal, who for some thirteen years appears
almost yearly, as buyer or seller, lender or borrower, on some forty
tablets, may serve as a further example,(1) or we may note how Bahianu
appears, chiefly as a corn lender, year after year, for thirty-three
years, on some twenty-four tablets.(2)

For the Second Empire of Babylonia, Professor J. Kohler and Dr. F. E.
Peiser have given some fine examples of this method. Thus, for the
bankruptcy of Nabu-aplu-iddin,(3) they show that the creditors distrained
upon the bankrupt's property and found a buyer for most of it in a great
Neriglissar, afterwards King of Babylon. The first creditor was paid in
full, another received about half of the amount due to him, a third about
the same, while a fourth obtained less than a quarter of what was owed
him. They also follow out the fortunes of the great banking firm of
Egibi(4) for fully a century. The sketch, of course, is not complete, and
can only be made so by a prolonged search through thousands of documents
in different museums; but it is intensely interesting and written with
wonderful insight and legal knowledge. Another example is the family, or
guild, of the priests of Gula.(5) This is less fully made out but most
valuable, as far as it goes. In both cases a genealogy is given extending
over many generations.

Later still, the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania,
in the ninth volume of Cuneiform Texts, gives a collection of the business
documents of one firm, "Murashu Sons, of Nippur," in the reign of
Artaxerxes I. Here we have to do with a family deed-chest, a collection of
documents found together and fortunately kept together.

But this method, attractive though it is, cannot be followed here. The
reader is best led on from the known to the unknown. Those things must be
taken first which must be understood in order to appreciate what is placed
later. We consider first the law and the law-courts. The reader can thus
follow the references to procedure which occur in the other sections. The
rights of the State, the family, and the private individual come next.
Then we learn of the classes of property and the vari