Gli "editti di remissione dei debiti" antico-babilonesi e loro ricezione nel Vicino Oriente antico.

In the Old Babylonian period a new kind of Royal Edicts (andurarum or mišarum) was used: it was a decree of remission on debts. The king promulgated measures to help his subjects, who were in straits. With this kind of edict the king remitted some kind of debts when they were negotiated before its promulgation; it set people free, when they were fallen in to captivity before its promulgation, and it annulled some sales, when they were made before its promulgation. The Old Babylonian kings tried to help their subjects enacting this kind of measures, and they generally did it in their first or second year of reign. Only Rīm-Sîn of Larsa, who reigned sixty years, and H˘ ammurapi of Babylon, who reigned 42 years, and his successors repeated it more time during their reign. We have a lot of legal texts with reference to the Royal Edicts: loans, sales, manumissions, proceedings and letters. Some of them are very famous because even quoted to expound the matter of the Edicts, others give us only few information. In this last case, the text has a little notation: written after the promulgation of the Royal Edict. In this way the scribe thought to protect the document against the effect of the Edict. But it was not useful, and we can see the born of another kind of document, the fictive adoptions. This kind of documents are very important in the documentation from Nuzi, where they replaced almost all the sale texts. There are other explanations for it, but it is possible that they were the answer to the Edict effects. Such kind of Edict was present in other periods of the Mesopotamian history, but there were different contexts to be considered, so it could have a different function.