Household and family

In recent years historians have applied a new rigour to the study of family and household structure, and although our documentary sources in Mesopotamia lack (with rare exceptions) the details of family size, of age and life expectancy, and of change through time that are needed for serious demographic research, they need to be approached in the light of this experience. The distinction between a family and a household is fundamental. While the family is composed of members related by blood or marriage, with limits which are inevitably vague, a household may be defined as a ‘co-resident domestic group’ (Laslett 1972, 24), whose limits at any time should be more or less precise. For government administrators and archaeologists alike the household is a much easier concept to cope with, while the family, whose members may have links of varying tenacity and proximity, is much less accessible. It is traditional to borrow from anthropology the terms ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ family, but they must not be allowed to suggest an inappropriately rigid dual polarity. Intermediate forms always exist, and over time the same family or household can move from one such type to another. A household composed of a single ‘conjugal family unit’ may be called ‘simple’, one with more than one conjugal family unit is conveniently called a ‘multiple household’; where the simple household is enlarged by the addition of an extra generation the term ‘expanded family household’ is less ambiguous than some. ¹²¹ An ‘extended family’ refers to ‘all relatives in habitual contact with a person, irrespective of whether they live with him’ (Laslett 1972, 29–30). Thus one can perfectly well have an ‘extended family’ composed of ‘simple households’. That members of such a family do not live together need not diminish its social significance, which operates most evidently in the realm of land tenure and marriage custom; for the archaeologist, however, it does diminish the opportunities of detecting the existence of extended families and their role in society. Fortunately in Mesopotamia the documentary sources come to our aid here.