Babylonians and Assyrians

Sayce wrote this handbook for readers who wanted to know how ordinary Mesopotamians lived rather than which king conquered whom. Working from the mass of cuneiform clay tablets recovered during the nineteenth century, he rebuilds the Babylonian and Assyrian household piece by piece: marriage contracts and dowries, adoption and inheritance, schooling and burial, slavery and hired labor, wages and house prices, the money-lender and his rates, the government and the army, the law courts, and the etiquette of letter-writing. A closing chapter turns to religion. Published in 1899 in the Handbooks in Semitics series, it predates the discovery of Hammurabi’s law stele at Susa, so its evidence is everyday paperwork: deeds, loans, wills and private letters. Some readings have since been revised, but the daily life Sayce assembled from that paperwork stays strikingly concrete.