NEO-BABYLONIAN CITIZENSHIP PRACTICES IN A COMPARATIVE MEDITERRANEAN CONTEXT¹

The present study traces elements of emerging citizenship practices in the ancient urban communities of the Neo-Babylonian state. It argues that almost at the same time as when Athenian demokratia was developing, notions of a citizen body and claiming of rights -what citizenship scholarship defines as ‘acts of citizenship’ -existed in Babylonia under the first world empires. It demonstrates that the Neo-Babylonian state, the emerging Athenian demokratia, and Rome before the Constitutio Antoniniana share aspects of citizenship acts: first, civic identity and prestige, based on a genealogical system of identification bound in legal terminology, as well as (active) involvement in cult; and second, institutionally bound privileges and obligations, which governed marriage, inheritance and certain economic activities, as well as certain duties towards urban and state institutions. Several case-studies are used to display these acts of citizenship: three-tier naming practices and use of gentilics, accumulation of power by urbanites through a structured set of practices, and acts of privilege provided by the state, or royal favour. It concludes with a comparative example of the boundaries of the rights of citizens: the rights of foreign women marrying into elite citizen families.