Here's a really interesting piece on how the elderly effectively blackmailed younger people to ensure their own care.
Found in the ruins of ancient Susa, dating from the first centuries of the second millennium BCE (that is, 2000 BCE - 1700 BCE), these texts--all in Akkadian, which was effectively the language of law in Elam (much as French was the language of law in England after the Norman Conquest)--map out legal issues surrounding the obligations of children to care for their parents in their parents' old age:
Children who were to inherit from their parents had the responsibility to provide care for them. This care included not only emotional support, but could also be translated as rations to be given. For example, in an Old Babylonian letter (AbB 11, 139), a man who had neglected his mother is ordered to send her 300 liters of barley.
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In another unique testament (MDP 24, 379), a man named Gimil-Adad gives all his property (currently owned and whatever he may acquire before he dies) to his wife and the mother of his children, Beltani. The main concern here is the wife’s well-being after her husband passes away. Codex Hammurabi §172 addresses one part of the problem: when the father dies, the children may try to force the mother to move out of the paternal house in order to divide and take possession of their inheritance shares. The related problem is the daily food and proper care that the children must provide for the ageing mother.
In MDP 24, 379 lines 10-22, there are two sets of stipulations regarding Beltani’s sons (one threatening and another gratifying): if they complain after the father has died and object to their mother’s inheriting from their father, they will be disinherited and literally “chased away” from what is now “her house.” The ungrateful son will not be allowed to enter her house and will get no food provision from the mother (lines 10-18). However, the son who shows respect and takes care of his mother will be able to stay in her house and will inherit whatever she has at the end of her life (lines 19-22). Instead of the usufruct (life-long time right to use) described in Codex Hammurabi §172, full legal ownership is given to the wife. The father is also concerned about his young daughter, as he stipulates in lines 23-25 that his sons “will jointly give whatever silver (is required for dowry?) to their sister Ilša-hegal.” This probably refers to providing a dowry for a younger sister who has not married yet.
All of this is really interesting, for several reasons for me. First of all, in the past century we have seen state-sponsored systems of public support, into which everyone must pay, as a device to ensure people are appropriately supported as they age. As this systemic support structure gains power (if it does), what does that do to relations between older and younger people in families? To be honest, most of the older people I know are proud of their self-sufficiency, and most of the middle-aged people I know, like my wife and I, are deliberate about ensuring we won't be "a burden" on our children. (I don't think we'd use that language, but I think we do think that we do not want to financially cost our children anything as we age, if at all possible.) And also, relations of dependence are easy to romanticize when you don't have to live in them day in and day out. My memory of earlier moments of inter-generational dependence do not suggest it was a pleasant context. To borrow from Erasmus, and a different matter, dulce bellum inexpertis. So I don't want to say this is all, or even mostly, loss. But might there be some loss here? It seems like this is another structure to secure our autonomy as much as possible, and to secure it by relating us to our caregivers not in a web of familial obligations but in a financially-secured web of commercial transactions. Serious question: Is something lost here? Or is it that a loss that has already happened, now being registered by this new situation?
(Side comment: I have been thinking about this more lately as I recently read Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic from the early 1970s, and was struck by--well, by a lot about that book, but in this case especially his argument that the development of the insurance industry in the 19th and especially 20th centuries really altered the way we think about the future and began to allow us to plan for it instead of hope about it, and that this was related to a decline in the operative conviction that spiritual negotiations with the deity might be a useful strategy. It's a crude argument, when you think about it, but it was interesting to me. Did insurance participate in secularizing Western Europe? You may be able to see how I got from that discussion to the questions about pension plans above.)
(Side comment # 2: Since writing this piece, I have found this report on how the decline in children will boost the need for "formal caregiving," which puts some hard numbers on my intuitions. Just FYI.)
Furthermore, consider the people involved, in two respects. First of all, the author of this piece, Hossein Badamchi, is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at the University of Tehran. If I can name and identify a scholar in another country, especially one which seems in such troubled conflict with my own, I want to do that. It is wonderful to me that Prof. Badamchi has written this, and that I am able to read it, and I long for a world where the kinds of communications between his country and my own are like this--one side educating the other, enriching the other, in any number of ways. So I am first of all happy to simply say thanks to an Iranian scholar, a fellow scholar whom I will likely never meet.
Second, consider the husband and wife, Gimil-Adad and Beltani, and their children, including their named daughter, Ilša-hegal. These people lived almost unimaginably long ago--3500 years or more; and today, because of the work of Prof. Badamchi and his colleagues S. Piran and M.Ghelichkhani, at the University and the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, you can know their names, and try in what is just as incomprehensible manner as my own, to say those names, names that were forgotten for almost four thousand years, but now can be said again:
Gimil-Adad
Beltani
Ilša-hegal
To me, there is something amazing in the thought that, one day, four or five thousand years from now, someone, in cities or lands or planets undreamt of by us today, might take in a breath and say our own names aloud again. We can say very little about the past; but the bare fact of recognizing that it happened, and that people lived, and that they had distinct, individual, irreplacable meaning and purpose, seems to me something very profound.
Perhaps our dust that day will hear those words and unsettle itself a little bit. Perhaps that unsettling may happen today to Gimil-Adad, Beltani, and their children, wherever their dust may be. If so, may their dust settle back again, into what I imagine is a well-deserved rest.