Tuesday 12 May 2020

Kudurru

Kudurru was a type of stone document used as boundary stones and as records of land grants to vassals by the Kassites in ancient Babylonia between the 16th and 12th centuries BCE...








The kudurrus recorded the land granted by the king to his vassals as a record of his decision. The original kudurru would be stored in a temple while the person granted the land would be given a clay copy to use as a boundary stone to confirm legal ownership...

The Kassites controlled Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire c. 1531 BC and until c. 1155 BC. They gained control of Babylonia after the Hittite sack of the city in 1595 BC, and established a dynasty based first in Babylon and later in Dur-Kurigalzu...

The Kassites were members of a small military aristocracy. The chariot and the horse, first came into use in Babylonia at this time...

The original homeland of the Kassites is not well-known, but appears to have been located in the Zagros Mountains, in what is now the Lorestan Province of Iran...

This is interesting: The Kassite language has not been classified...Officially "their language was not related to either the Indo-European language group, nor to Semitic or other Afro-Asiatic languages, and is most likely to have been a language isolate"...

Even more interesting: "However, the arrival of the Kassites has been connected to the contemporary migrations of Indo-European peoples (Chariots!!!)"...

Even even more interesting: "Several Kassite leaders and deities bore Indo-European names, and it is possible that they were dominated by an Indo-European elite (military aristocracy!!!) similar to the Mitanni, who ruled over the Hurro-Urartian-speaking Hurrians of Asia Minor..."

Why is this interesting? Kudurru, "the gift stone". Apparently "...a word probably of Elamite origin that means both 'boundary marker' but also 'eldest son'"...This is interesting as it is the eldest son who usually inherits the land in Indo-European culture...

KUDURRU specifies WHO the land was GIVEN AS GIFT

In Serbian (and other Slavic languages) we have these two words:

KO, KUJ (who)-from Proto-Slavic *kъto, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos
DAR (gift)-from Proto-Slavic *darъ, from Proto-Indo-European *deh₃rom.

Was kudurru more like a Indoeuropean ko+dar=who+gift?

When was Kudurru first recorded as a word? During Kassites rule or before? Maybe this is just a coincidence...

2 comments:

  1. I find *donum gift from don- give, but not *deh₃rom. Was that a Slavic-only dialect of IE?

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    Replies
    1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/darъ

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