Hammurabi already wrote rules for adopters and adoptees
Adoption permanently shifts parenting rights and duties from birth parents to new ones, needing legal or religious recognition unlike temporary guardianship. Modern forms crystallized in the United States, yet Hammurabi’s Code already listed adopter rights and adoptee duties. Ancient practice often served political and economic alliance more than child welfare ideals.
Some societies passed specific adoption laws, while others relied on contracts that set out inheritance and parental duties without transferring filiation. Comprehensive modern statutes arose in the twentieth century. Roman adoption is well documented in the Codex Justinianus: wealthy families used it to cement alliances and produce male heirs to run estates, many emperors were adopted sons, adrogation required the adoptee's own consent, and some adoptions were even made after death.
Adopting babies seems to have been rare in antiquity. Abandoned infants were often collected as slaves and made up a large share of the empire's supply, though families sometimes raised foundlings as their own; these children, called alumni, lived in something like guardianship and legally still belonged to the father who had exposed them. In India adoption was narrow and ritualistic, so a man could have a son perform his funeral rites, and in China boys were adopted to carry on ancestor worship. Polynesians, including Hawaiians, commonly raised relatives' or friends' children, a custom called hānai.
Germanic, Celtic and Slavic nobles who ruled post-Roman Europe rejected adoption because bloodlines were everything; a dynasty with no natural-born heir was replaced. English common law refused adoption as contrary to inheritance rules, and the Napoleonic Code required adopters to be over 50, sterile, at least 15 years older than the child and to have fostered them for six years. Informal deals persisted: a charter from Lucca in 737 made three adoptees heirs, stressing their duty to care for the adoptive father in old age.
With nobles uninterested, adoption turned toward abandoned children, many left at church doors. Through oblation, children were dedicated to monasteries and raised there free of legal or social stigma, a step toward foundling hospitals and orphanages.
Source: Adoption
