Nuzi law kept land inside the family, so the landowner Tehip-tilla had himself adopted by seller after seller

About 7,000 tablets survive from Nuzi, a town near modern Kirkuk, dated about 1440 to 1340 BC. The Encyclopaedia Judaica's entry says land there could be sold only within the family, and dealers got round this by having themselves adopted. A typical tablet reads: "Tablet of adoption of Tehip-tilla son of Puhi-shenni. Now Hanakka son of Ak-kuya adopted him." Hanakka gave his new "son" a field, and Tehip-tilla gave Hanakka 15 shekels of silver "as his gift." Hanakka kept the ilku, the service owed on the land. Another "father," Arip-apu, gave Tehip-tilla a four-homer field by the Malashu watercourse "as his inheritance share." Maynard Maidman, who spent 36 years editing one volume of these tablets, calls real estate adoption the most common contract in the family's records and gives the usual price as eight homers of barley for each homer of land. In 1936 E.A. Speiser called Tehip-tilla "that other notorious Nuzian" and wrote of his "acquisitiveness and power." Tehip-tilla sat as one of the officials before whom land transfers were sworn. The record of a corruption trial of the mayor Kushshiharbe notes that during that mayor's term Tehip-tilla received land. An Assyrian scribe, Attilammu, sold himself into slavery to his house. Speiser traced the family through his son Enna-mati to his grandson Takku, who "lived to see his estate" ransacked by the Assyrians. Most Nuzi tablets are now at Harvard and in Chicago.