In the course of his garrison duty or when on special service, these officers ran some risk of being captured by the enemy, and in that event regulations were drawn up for their ransom.  If the captured officer was wealthy and could pay for his own ransom, he was bound to do so, but if he had not the necessary means his ransom was to be paid out of the local temple treasury, and, when the funds in the temple treasury did not suffice, he was to be ransomed by the state.  It was specially enacted that his land and garden and house were in no case to be sold in order to pay for his ransom.  These were inalienably attached to the office which he held, and he was not allowed to sell them or the sheep and cattle with which they were stocked.  Moreover, he was not allowed to bequeath any of this property to his wife or daughter, so that his office would appear to have been hereditary and the property attached to it to have been entailed on his son if he succeeded him.  Such succession would not, of course, have taken place if the officer by his own neglect or disobedience had forfeited his office and its privileges during his lifetime.

It has been suggested with considerable probability that these officials were originally personal retainers and follows of Sumu-abu, the founder of the First Dynasty of Babylon.  They were probably assigned lands throughout the country in return for their services to the king, and their special duties were to preserve order and uphold the authority of their master.  In the course of time their duties were no doubt modified, but they retained their privileges and they must have continued to be a very valuable body of officers, on whose personal loyalty the king could always rely.  In the preceding chapter we have already seen how grants of considerable estates were made by the Kassite kings of the Third Dynasty to followers who had rendered conspicuous services, and at the same time they received the privilege of holding such lands free of all liability to forced labour and the payment of tithes and taxes.  We may conclude that the class of royal officers under the kings of the First Dynasty had a similar origin.

In the present chapter, from information recently made available, we have given some account of the system of administration adopted by the early kings of Babylon, and we have described in some detail the various classes of the Babylonian population, their occupations, and the conditions under which they lived.  In the two preceding chapters we have dealt with the political history of Western Asia from the very earliest period of the Sumerian city-states down to the time of the Kassite kings.  In the course of this account we have seen how Mesopotamia in the dawn of history was in the sole possession of the Sumerian race and how afterwards it fell in turn under the dominion of the Semites and the kings of Elam.  The immigration of fresh Semitic tribes at the end of the third millennium before Christ resulted in the establishment in Babylon