[Illustration: IMPRESSIONS OF BABYLONIAN CILINDER SEALS. _Brit. Mus., Nos._ 89771, 89388, 89110, 89367.]
It is not improbable that the existence of this specially favoured class of officer dates back to the earliest settlement of the Western Semites in Babylonia. The first of their number may well have been personal retainers and followers of Sumu-abum, the founder of the dynasty. Originally soldiers, they were probably assigned lands throughout the country in return for their services to the king, and they continued to serve him by maintaining order and upholding his authority. In the course of time specified duties were assigned to them, but they retained their privileges, and they must have remained a very valuable body of officers, on whose personal loyalty the king could always rely. In the case of war, they may have assisted in mobilization for the army was probably raised on a territorial basis, much on the lines of the _corvée_ for public works which was under their control.
By contemporary documents of the period much light is thrown on other classes of the population, but, as they were all connected with various departments in the commercial or agricultural life of the community, it will be unnecessary to describe them in further detail. One class perhaps deserves mention, the surgeons, since lack of professional skill was rather heavily penalized. For if a surgeon, when called in by a noble, carried out an operation so unskilfully as to cause his death or inflict a permanent injury upon him, such as the loss of an eye, the punishment was amputation of both hands. No penalty appears to have been enacted if the patient were a member of the middle class, but should the slave of such a man die as the result of an operation, the surgeon had to give the owner another slave; and, in the event of the slave losing his eye, he had to pay the owner half the slave's value. There was, of course, no secular class in the population which corresponded to the modern doctor, for the medicinal use of herbs and drugs was not separated from their employment in magic. Disease was looked upon as due to the agency of evil spirits, or of those that controlled them, and though many potions were doubtless drunk of a curative nature, they were taken at the instance of the magician, not of the doctor, and to the accompaniment of magical rites and incantations.[45]