Open Collections

A new approach to ancient archives : a re-evaluation of "daughtership" adoption at Nuzi

University of British Columbia

In the early 20th century, excavations at the archaeological site of Yorghan Tepe in Northeastern Iraq revealed the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1450-1340 BCE) city of Nuzi. Over the course of four archaeological seasons, approximately 5000 cuneiform tablets were excavated from Nuzi and its surrounding areas. The tablets reveal that the people of Nuzi had many nuanced legal practices, including but not limited to lawsuits, land claims, marriages, hiring contracts, and many kinds of adoption. One adoption practice that has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for almost a century is known as “marriage adoption” or “daughtership adoption.” This practice involved young women being adopted before they were of marriageable age, to be married off to a future husband by their adopter rather than by their natal family. Although there is evidence for the adoption of young women for marriage across the ancient Near East, this practice is by far the most attested at Nuzi. Moreover, Nuzians had a unique approach to marriage adoption where the young women could be adopted in “daughtership,” “daughter-in-law-ship,” or “daughter and daughter-in-law-ship” by the adopter. Scholars have questioned how these three types of marriage adoption differ, and in addition, why this small, Hurrian town used the practice so frequently in its short 4-5 generations. This thesis seeks to answer these two questions. Toward this end, I rely not only on the content of the contracts, but also on the people who used them. Earlier scholarship has overlooked the archival contexts of the daughtership adoptions, in particular the fact that two wealthy households in Nuzi account for 40% of extant daughtership tablets. Through close reading of the daughtership contracts from private archives of Teḫip-tilla, Tulpun-naya and their respective households, I demonstrate that daughtership adoption at Nuzi is a flexible practice that had implications beyond finding a future spouse for the adoptee. Moreover, I argue that daughtership adoption varies not by “type” of contract, “daughtership,” “daughter-in-law-ship,” or “daughter and daughter-in-law-ship,” but by the different people involved in each adoption and their social/economic status.

Text

2021-04-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77936

Ancient Culture, Religion and Ethnicity

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/