119 Legal Remedies against Misfortune: Evasion, Legal Fiction, and Sham Transactions in Late Bronze Age Emar Lena Fijałkowska ŁóDź Sources from the Late Bronze Age Syrian city of Emar are full of mentions of misfortune, both personal and, more often, afecting the whole land. The latter is re- lected mostly in the well-known “year of duress” formula, an allusion to situations of war, famine, and high inlation, forcing free people to sell of their real estate, and sometimes even their children and themselves. 1 As for the former, a whole range of disasters, misfortunes and lesser troubles plaguing the Emarites may be observed, from overwhelming debts impossible to pay and sudden poverty due to personal circumstances, to unhappy marriages, to ungrateful children refusing to care for their parents, to childlessness and, as a result, a lonely and miserable old age, to lack of sons able to continue the family cult. Of course, the citizens of Emar did not passively bear their lot; the texts show varied strategies of dealing with blows of fate, as well as a panoply of legal remedies to be used in order to at least diminish their impact. In cases involving a conlict, one possibility was a trial, but it is not surprising that more often than not, Bronze Age Syrians preferred to settle their disputes privately, within the family if possible, or before collective bodies such as the “brothers,” probably a group of most prominent and richest landowners. 2 Only having run out of possibilities, they would go to court. They were, however, remark- ably ingenious in inventing legal constructions aimed at avoiding further negative consequences of their bad luck. What is more, also the local customary law seems to have favoured such invention, leaving the citizens a lot of freedom in shaping their legal relations, but at the same time striving to safeguard the interests of all inter- ested parties; this principle of balance is shared with Mesopotamian law, where it is very clearly mirrored in the law collections. 3 Family law is one area where this legal creativity found its outlet to some- times truly spectacular efects. 4 The main legal tool used to solve problems such Author’s note: Following abbreviations are used for Emar texts: AO = Arnaud 1987; ASJ = Tsukimoto 1991; Emar = Arnaud 1986; PdA = Fales 1988; RA = Huehnergard 1983; RE = Beckman 1996b; Semitica 46 = Arnaud 1996; TBR = Arnaud 1991. 1. See Zaccagnini 1994 and 1995; Adamthwaite 2001: 133–78; Fijałkowska 2014a. 2. On the “brothers” and their judicial authority in Late Bronze Age Syria, see D’Alfonso 2005 and Démare-Lafont 2012. 3. Fijałkowska 2014c. 4. For a general outline of family law in Emar, see Beckman 1996a and Westbrook 2003.