From these regulations it will be seen that the owner of land in Babylonia under the later Kassite kings, unless granted special exemption, was liable to furnish forced labour for public works both to the state and to his local district; he had to supply grazing and pasture for the flocks and herds of the king and the governor, and to pay various taxes and tithes on land, irrigation-water, and crops. We have already noted the prevalence of similar customs under the First Dynasty,[73] and it is clear that the successive conquests to which the country had been subjected, and its domination by a foreign race, had not to any appreciable extent affected the life and customs of the people nor even the general character of the administrative system.
On one subject the boundary-stones throw additional light, which is lacking at the period of the First Dynasty, and that is the old Babylonian system of land tenure. They suggest that the lands, which formed the subject of royal grants during the Kassite period, were generally the property of the local _bîtu,_ or tribe.[74] In certain cases the king actually purchased the land from the _bîtu_ in whose district it was situated, and, when no consideration was given, we need merely assume that it was requisitioned by royal authority. The primitive system of tribal or collective proprietorship, which is attested by the Obelisk of Manishtusu,[75] undoubtedly survived into the Kassite period, when it co-existed with the system of private ownership, as it had doubtless done at the time of the West-Semitic kings. The _bîtu_ must often have occupied an extensive area, split up into separate districts or groups of villages. It had its own head, the _bêl bîti,_ and its own body of local functionaries, who were quite distinct from the official and military servants of the state. In fact, agricultural life in Babylonia during the earlier periods must have presented many points of analogy to such examples of collective proprietorship as may be seen in the village communities of India at the present day. As the latter system has survived the political changes and revolutions of many centuries, so it is probable that the tribal proprietorship in Babylonia was slow to decay.