Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Babylonian law. Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC in middle chronology) Hittite laws, also known as the 'Code of the Nesilim' (developed c. 1650–1500 BC, in effect until c. 1100 BC) Assyrian law, also known as the Middle Assyrian Laws (MAL) or the Code of the Assyrians/Assura (developed c. 1450–1250 BC, oldest extant copy c. 1075 BC) [4]
Babylonian law is a subset of cuneiform law that has received particular study due to the large amount of archaeological material that has been found for it. So-called "contracts" exist in the thousands, including a great variety of deeds, conveyances, bonds, receipts, accounts, and most important of all, actual legal decisions given by the judges in the law courts.
The laws are written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian. Their style is regular and repetitive, and today they are a standard set text for introductory Akkadian classes. [ 134 ] However, as A. Leo Oppenheim summarises, the cuneiform signs themselves are "vertically arranged ... within boxes placed in bands side by side from right to left ...
c. 1800 BC – Laws of the city of Eshnunna (sometimes ascribed to king Bilalama) Babylonian law. c. 1758 BC – Code of Hammurabi – The most famous and also most preserved of the ancient laws. Discovered in December 1901, it contains over 282 paragraphs of text, not including the prologue and epilogue. c. 1500-1300 BC – Assyrian law
The audience of the Laws of Eshnunna is more extensive than in the case of the earlier cuneiform codifications: awilum – free men and women (mar awilim and marat awilim), muškenum, wife (aššatum), son (maru), slaves of both sexes – male (wardum) and female (amtum) – which are not only objects of law as in classical slavery, and delicts ...
The laws are arranged in casuistic form of IF (crime) THEN (punishment)—a pattern followed in nearly all later codes. It institutes fines of monetary compensation for bodily damage as opposed to the later lex talionis ('eye for an eye') principle of Babylonian law. However, murder, robbery, adultery and rape were capital offenses.
The Babyloniaca is a text written in the Greek language by the Babylonian priest and historian Berossus in the 3rd century BCE. Although the work is now lost, it survives in substantial fragments from subsequent authors, especially in the works of the fourth-century CE Christian author and bishop Eusebius, [1] and was known to a limited extent in learned circles as late as late antiquity. [2]
The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, written between 1755–1750 BC, also distinguishes between the free and the enslaved. Like the Code of Ur-Nammu, it offers a reward of two shekels for returning a fugitive slave, but unlike the other code, states that harbouring or assisting a fugitive was punishable by death.