Sons and Descendants: A Social History of Kin Groups and by John P. Nielsen

By John P. Nielsen

The dissertation employs criminal and administrative files from the 8th and 7th centuries to stipulate the shape of huge family members teams or clans in Babylonia and surmise what roles they performed in Babylonian society. A marked elevate in documentation from Babylonia in the course of those centuries makes this the earliest interval during which such family members teams could be stories intimately. a huge element of the dissertation is an exam of local alterations in kinfolk identify utilization. family members names seem to have been hired such a lot prevalently in northern Babylonia, rather on the towns of Babylon, Borsippa, and Dilbat. there's a major volume of textual proof on hand from Nippur in principal Babylonia. even if, relatives names look very not often within the resources, suggesting that the inhabitants there didn't use of kinfolk names. There also are only a few attestations of relatives names within the texts from Uruk and Ur. unlike Nippur, even if, a radical prosopographical research makes it obvious that at Uruk, there have been kinfolk teams that pointed out themselves with a relatives identify. The dissertation concludes by means of contemplating the origins of those relatives teams within the moment millennium, drawing upon the sparse facts from the former centuries, and their next improvement within the first millennium. Anthropological views on kinship and kinfolk also are applied. The dissertation asserts that using relatives names between family teams was firm essentially through descent or adoption. the looks of exact family members names at diverse towns used to be due mostly to contributors moving to new towns and never to fictitious claims of shared ancestry through diversified households.

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Extra info for Sons and Descendants: A Social History of Kin Groups and Family Names in the Early Neo-Babylonian Period, 747–626 BC

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The most complete recension of the composition is from Sultantepe and contains a colophon dated in the year , the eponymy of Han¯anu (STT   r. U.  / ], for the eponymy of Han¯anu see Millard, ˘ library (K. ) SAAS , ). Fragments of the composition come from Ashurbanipal’s and Neo-Babylonian Nippur (Maria de Jong Ellis, “A New Fragment of the Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur,” JCS  []:– [N ]). The statement in the colophon that the recension was copied from an older tablet indicates that the story was first written down prior to .

The tablet cited at the start of the introduction is unique because it states that each of the paternal houses identified by family names was associated with pieces of real estate in Babylon. More often the term b¯ıtu is used as an abstract term for the collective members of a family. Because of the abstract nature of the b¯ıtu in some of the evidence, the theories of LéviStrauss and others about household societies have a special relevance. Lévi-Strauss drew inspiration for his concept of house societies from the noble houses of feudal Europe whose members strove to retain both the real property and wealth of the family as well as titles and prerogatives.

31 Because the rules of descent allow for several collateral lines to claim descent from an ancestor, several segments may exist within a lineage or a clan. 32 Others have suggested that lineage systems could 30 There is evidence that father’s brother’s daughter marriage was employed in the ancient Near East. If so, descent from the paternal line would have been reinforced through the mother. (J. : Eisenbrauns, ], –). 31 Robert Parkin, Kinship: An Introduction to Basic Concepts (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.

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