Land grant to Ḫasardu kudurru

A kudurru of this kind is a stone record of a royal land grant from middle Babylonian practice. This example is a four-sided limestone narû, or memorial stele, from the late second millennium BC. It commemorates a gift by the Kassite king Meli-Šipak, whose reign is placed around 1186 to 1172 BC, to an official named Ḫasardu. The name is written Ḫa-SAR-du; the reading is uncertain, and that uncertainty is part of what the object still asks of its readers.

The land measured 144 hectares, roughly 360 acres, on the bank of the Royal Canal in the Bīt-Pir’i-Amurru region of the Diyala valley. The recipient held the office of sukkal mu’irri. Those details — quantity, watercourse, region, and title — are why the stone is more than a royal flourish. They place a person inside an administrative landscape and show what a Kassite king could convey, and to whom.

The stele carries a title that doubles as an appeal: “O Adad, the hero, bestow irrigation ditches of abundance here!” The grant is canal-side land; the prayer is for the ditches that would keep that land productive. Divine protection and practical hydrology sit in the same line of text. Kudurrus commonly bound a legal act to the gods so that violation of the grant was not only a breach of royal order but an offence under higher sanction. Here that logic is visible in the opening address itself.

What survives, then, is routine high administration cut in limestone: a monarch, an official, a measured estate beside a royal canal, and a god asked to underwrite the water. The object is now in the British Museum. It remains of interest less as an isolated curiosity than as a dense sample of middle Babylonian officialdom — offices, place-names, and the form in which a land gift was meant to be remembered.