A land sale from the days of the last Sumerian king of Larsa

[Sumerian cuneiform]. Cuneiform contract for sale of land for a silver mine.

€ 8,500.00

Contract for a sale of land, previously an orchard, to be used as a silver mine. The transaction took place in the Sumerian kingdom of Larsa, the dominant of Mesopotamia at the time. It is dated to the reign of Rim-Sîn I, the area's final king before its conquest by Hammurabi of Babylon.

The land is described as an orchard planted with palm, pomegranate and apple trees. The seller, Awiyatum, swears that neither he nor his descendants will make any claim on it in future to the purchaser, Abum-il(um), who intends it for a silver mine. Six witnesses attest to the sale, and the date is given as being in the first month of the 14th year of the reign of King Rim-Sîn I of Larsa (1822-1763 BCE), thus c. 1808 BCE.

The reference to Rim-Sîn not only allows us to date this transaction precisely but also to locate it in the Kingdom of Larsa, the most powerful of the Sumerian city-states immediately before the area's conquest by Babylon. At the point this document was issued, Rim-Sîn was approaching the height of his power, conquering several other cities in the subsequent years, culminating with sacking Uruk in 1801 and seizing Isin, Larsa's main rival for regional power, in 1792. He was in turn defeated by Hammurabi in 1764 BCE, and the area was incorporated into the First Babylonian Empire.

Cuneiform writing developed in the early third millennium BCE out of earlier pictograms which had come to take on syllabic value. It was used over the subsequent millennia for administrative and legal documents and for literary works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Although first developed for Sumerian (the language used here), it was also used to write other languages of ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia, such as Akkadian, Elamite, Old Persian and Hittite.

A document of Sumerian society at a crucial turning-point as it was about to be subsumed into the Babylonian Empire.