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. The principal factor in its disintegration was undoubtedly the policy, pursued by the West-Semitic and Kassite conquerors, of settling their own officers and more powerful adherents on estates throughout the country. Both these periods thus represent a time of transition, during which the older system of land tenure gradually gave way in face of the policy of private ownership, which for purely political reasons was so strongly encouraged by the crown. There can be no doubt that under the West-Semitic kings, at any rate from the time of Hammurabi onwards, the policy of confiscation was rarely resorted to. And even the earlier rulers of that dynasty, since they were of the same racial stock as a large proportion of their new subjects, would have been the more inclined to respect tribal institutions which may have found a parallel in their land of origin. The Kassites, on the other hand, had no such racial associations to restrain them, and it is significant that the kudurrus were now for the first time introduced, with their threatening emblems of divinity and their imprecatory clauses. At first employed to guard the rights of private ownership, often based on high-handed requisition by the king, they were afterwards retained for transfers of landed property by purchase. In the Neo-Babylonian period, when the boundary-stones recorded long series of purchases by means of which the larger landed estates were built up, the imprecations and symbols had