AKKADIAN LAW TABLET.

The contract tablets illustrate the working of the family law of Babylonia to some extent, but less than might perhaps have been anticipated. This is owing to the tendency seen in every deeply rooted system of customary law, to take for granted and leave unexplained just its most familiar and fundamental principles. The mass of usage which prevailed in Mesopotamia after the time of the first Sargon—whenever that may have been—was a cross between pure Sumerian gynæcocracy, which bore doubtless considerable resemblance to Egyptian custom, and the patriarchal theory of the family characteristic of the Semitic stock. It is almost unexampled that two such opposite types of usage should have blended, and the explanation is, possibly, that the later and more intolerant form was held by tribes, so obviously inferior in material civilization and intellectual culture, that they had actually more wish to borrow than to dictate. By the time that they had borrowed all that they found most attractive in Sumerian civilization, they and their teachers had both become essentially bi-lingual, and there was no antagonism between the races to induce scholars or patriots to trace the different ideas that existed harmoniously together, to their divers origins.