ith which they were stocked. Moreover, he was not allowed
to bequeath any of this property to his wife or daughter, so that his
office would appear to have been hereditary and the property attached to
it to have been entailed on his son if he succeeded him. Such succession
would not, of course, have taken place if the officer by his own neglect
or disobedience had forfeited his office and its privileges during his
lifetime.

It has been suggested with considerable probability that these officials
were originally personal retainers and follows of Sumu-abu, the founder
of the First Dynasty of Babylon. They were probably assigned lands
throughout the country in return for their services to the king, and
their special duties were to preserve order and uphold the authority of
their master. In the course of time their duties were no doubt modified,
but they retained their privileges and they must have continued to be a
very valuable body of officers, on whose personal loyalty the king could
always rely. In the preceding chapter we have already seen how grants of
considerable estates were made by the Kassite kings of the Third Dynasty
to followers who had rendered conspicuous services, and at the same time
they received the privilege of holding such lands free of all liability
to forced labour and the payment of tithes and taxes. We may conclude
that the class of royal officers under the kings of the First Dynasty
had a similar origin.

In the present chapter, from information recently made available, we
have given some account of the system of administration adopted by the
early kings of Babylon, and we have described in some detail the
various classes of the Babylonian population, their occupations, and the
conditions under which they lived. In the two preceding chapters we have
dealt with the political history of Western Asia from the very earliest
period of the Sumerian city-states down to the time of the Kassite
kings. In the course of this account we have seen how Mesopotamia in the
dawn of history was in the sole possession of the Sumerian race and how
afterwards it fell in turn under the dominion of the Semites and the
kings of Elam. The immigration of fresh Semitic tribes at the end of the
third millennium before Christ resulted in the establishment in Babylon
of the Semitic kings who are known as First Dynasty kings; and under the
sway of Hammurabi, the greatest of this group of kings, the empire thus
established in