Law codes and other documents divided free individuals into two classes. Many people were referred to as awilum ("man"), a term that denoted citizens who owned property, particularly land but often also houses and livestock. They included powerful officials, high-ranking soldiers, successful merchants, senior clergy, and wealthy landowners, but also more modest individuals, small farmers, self-employed craftsmen, and the like.
Less certain is the significance of the second-rank designation mushkennum. The mushkennum did not own land or livestock, and by Old Babylonian times, the term denoted a pauper. People referred to as mushkennum were dependents of the temple or palace, reliant on the institution for work for which they received rations of food and clothing. Often they lived on royal estates, paying a part of their agricultural produce to the king and being liable for military service. Many were employed as artisans, men for instance as gardeners, carpenters, or metalworkers, women particularly in the huge textile industry. References to mushkennum in law codes and other public documents show that their welfare was considered an important royal responsibility. Their political rights were probably relatively restricted although they could speak in the citizens' assembly (puhrum).
Both men and women could work as scribes, of whom the bureaucracy required large numbers, particularly in Ur III times. Surprisingly, literacy was not necessarily associated with high status: The majority of female scribes in the palace at Mari were probably slaves, and slave girls trained as scribes were sometimes included in a dowry.
Slaves (wardum) occupied the lowest social status specified in the law codes. Distinctions were made between the three tiers of society, for example in the amount payable in compensation for injury, which was highest for awilum and lowest for slaves. Slaves included both prisoners of war and local people who had descended into slavery through debt. Society also included a number of manumitted slaves (hupshu).
Foreigners, such as traders or pastoralists, were distinguished by their ethnic identity, reflected in their outlandish names, and aspects of their behavior (for example, the Amorite who "eats his food raw"). Those who settled in Mesopotamia were quickly assimilated, as the Amorites illustrate. Originally pastoralists living in the desert region west of Mesopotamia, a few appeared in Babylonia from around 2400 b. c.e., and by 2100 they were a major nuisance, making frequent raids and settling in some regions. In the early second millennium many cities came under the rule of Amorite chieftains. Settled Amorites, like the royal family at Mari, maintained family ties with their still-nomadic tribal cousins but were largely indistinguishable from the native population; and by 1700 b. c.e. Amorites were no longer referred to.
Down the centuries, Mesopotamia, and particularly the cosmopolitan city of Babylon, continued to attract settlers from adjacent regions and tribes: Hurrians and Kassites in the second millennium, Chaldaeans, Aramaeans, and Arabs in the first, as well as small numbers of Egyptians, Elamites, Phoenicians, and others; the ranks of foreigners were swelled, in the first millennium in particular, by large numbers of deportees from the Levant, Elam, and other conquered regions. The absence of racism and religious intolerance facilitated the integration of people of all creeds and ethnic affiliations. For instance, although the Bible paints the Babylonian Exile as a universally abhorred episode, in fact when Cyrus offered to repatriate the Jewish exiles some fifty years later, many chose to stay in Babylon, where a highly respected Jewish community and center of Jewish scholarship flourished for many centuries.
World History
