The relations between the laws of Babylonia and the laws of the Hebrew peoples / by C.H.W. Johns.

  • Claude Hermann Walter Johns
Date:
1914
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The relations between the laws of Babylonia and the laws of the Hebrew peoples / by C.H.W. Johns. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and goods. The earliest copy oF the Code sometimes gives amelu where the later reads nmshkenu. Muller had called him an Armenstiftler, but there is no trace of his receiving a pension. Kohler, Reiser, and Ungnad call him Ministerial, but adduce no evidence that he had any special relation to government or clergy. Hommel thought him a dependant of the priests, comparing the Hebrew Cohen. The word, as Mr. Combe has shown in Babyloniaca,^^ is found in Arabic—masdkin, used of those who are not sddeh (plural sayyid) descendants of the Prophet; nor masliayikh, ‘ nobles ’, affiliated to the family of the Prophet; nor gabdyil, ‘ secular nobles ’ ; but including the ^labourers^, ^workers’, ‘merchants^, ^schoolmasters^, ‘ sycophants and ‘ mendicants They are unable to cany arms, have no organization, and are entirely under the domination of the nobles. They cannot in any case change their condition. This seems to have been tbeir exact position in ancient Babylonia also, at any rate in somewhat later times. The mushkenu may have descended to a lower position in Babylon, for the phrase, ana mushkenuti aldku, meant ‘ to go to misery ^ to be ruined’. We may even note steps in this degradation. In the Tell-el-Amarna tablets, Amenophis king of Egypt answers the letter of Kadashman-Ellil, the Kassite king of Babylon, who had inquired after his daughter the princess Tsukhartu, one of the Egyptian king’s matrimonial alliances. The Babylonian king says that Amenophis had had his sister to wife, but no messenger of his had ever been able to converse with that princess, or to know whether she was alive or dead. They had indeed seen a certain lady, but whether she was the daughter of some mushkenu they could not tell. They hardly suspected her of being a poor man’s daughter, only of being a ‘ commoner ’. So too, in the days when Babylonia was subject to Assyria, the Babylonians complained that they were being treated as mushkenu, not surely as poor men merely, for the obvious answer would be to increase their taxes, but as inferiors subject to indignities. At any rate, in Hammurabi’s Code they are free and possess moderate means, but are inferior persons to the amelu, yet superior to the slave. We see that these poor men fell later into still more abject con- ditions. In the later texts it is usually their weakness, helplessness, and poverty that is dwelt upon.’® Hence my first rendering was 'poor-man’, but later I preferred to use ' plebeian ’, to which view most scholars have now come round.
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