During the reign of the fifth king of the Isin dynasty, Lipit-Ishtar, a new law was needed. One of the most important provisions of the Lipit-Ishtar Code dealt with debt slavery, which was prevalent both by people selling themselves as slaves and by family members. The code also mandated community service for public works and established fair tax rates and probate laws. Although these laws were known and understood by the legal assemblies, they were not generally consulted to reach a verdict, as academic Gwendolyn Leick explains: The codex provides insight into the social structure during the Third Dynasty of Ur. Under the lugal (“great man” or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic classes: the lu or free man or the slave (male, arad; female gem). A Lu`s son was called Dumu-nita until he married and became a “young man” (gurus). A woman (munus) went from a daughter (dumu-mi) to a woman (dam), and then, if she survived her husband, a widow (nu-ma-su) who could remarry. Although earlier legal texts are known to exist, such as the Urukagina Codex, it is the oldest surviving legal text. It is three centuries older than the Code of Hammurabi.
Laws are arranged in casuistic form from IF (crime) THEN (punishment) – a pattern followed in almost all subsequent codes. He introduced fines for bodily injury, contrary to the later lex talionis (“eye for an eye”) of Babylonian law. However, murder, robbery, adultery and rape are capital crimes. He recognized the power of religious beliefs to influence personal behavior and presented his laws as if they had been received by the gods. He seems to have made sure that people understood that the king was only the steward and not the author of the code, and if someone broke the law, he rebelled against God`s will. Kriwaczek comments: Instead of fines, the Code was based on the concept of retaliatory justice (also known as Lex Talionis), defined by the famous saying “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. Although the laws of Hammurabi were almost certainly modeled on the original Nammu code, they were much more detailed to ensure strict compliance. However, there were a number of steps between the Ur-Nammu codex and that of Hammurabi and good reasons why your-Nammu`s rather benevolent code of law needed to be changed. The subjects of the Third Dynasty of your were more or less a homogeneous population of Sumerians, but at the time of the last monarch, Ibbi-Sin (r. 1963-1940 BC). The population was more diverse. This trend continued with the founding of the Isin dynasty by Ishbi-Erra around 1953/1940.
Ishbi-Erra defeated the Amorites and Elamites, who had tried to fill the power vacuum after the fall of the Gutians, and some of these people now lived and worked among the Sumerians in greater numbers than before. The first code of law of Mesopotamia was the Code of Law of Urukagina (c. 24th century BC), which survived in the present only by mentions in other ancient works. Although the codex of your-Nammu is incomplete, it has retained enough to allow scholars to understand the king`s vision of law and order in his lands. your-Nammu presented himself as the father of his people and encouraged his subjects to see themselves as one family and its laws as the rules of a house. Punishment, with the exception of capital crimes, took the form of fines, just as a child could be deprived of a hobby or favorite toy for bad behavior. Its mid-21st century BC codex dealt with witchcraft, slave flight and assault. A more extensive remnant of Sumerian law is the so-called Code of Lipit-Ishtar (ca. 1934-24 BC), which contains the typical prologue, article and epilogue and. Although the laws were promulgated under the king`s name, it is possible that they were issued by his son Shulgi after your-Nammu`s death. The code was developed by Shulgi`s successors and influenced the form and underlying vision of later codes such as the laws of Eshnunna (c. 1930 BC) and the laws enacted during the reign of Lipit-Ishtar (c.
1870 to c. 1860 BC). These codes, in turn, served as a model for the Code of Hammurabi, which would influence the laws of other civilizations, especially the creation of the Mosaic Law of the Bible. AncientPages.com 2016. Codes of your Nammu: The oldest known law code in the world. [Online] Available at: www.ancientpages.com/2016/03/11/codes-of-your-nammu-worlds-oldest-known-law-code/ In all likelihood, I would have completely missed Nammu`s original tablet if it hadn`t been for a favorable letter from F. R. Kraus, now professor of cuneiform studies at Leiden University in Holland.
His letter states that a few years ago, as part of his duties as curator at the Istanbul Museum, he came across two fragments of a panel bearing Sumerian laws, “connected” the two pieces and catalogued the resulting panel as number 3191 of the museum`s Nippur collection. As Sumerian tablets of the law are extremely rare, I immediately had number 3191 brought to my office. There it was, a sun-baked tablet, light brown, 20 by 10 centimeters. More than half of the writing was destroyed, and what was left seemed hopelessly incomprehensible at first. But after a few days of concentrated study, its contents began to become clear and take shape, and I realized with great excitement that what I was holding in my hand was a copy of the oldest code of law known to mankind. The code was widely distributed during the reign of Shulgi, who, as mentioned earlier, may even have been the actual author. However, there was no need to publicly display the laws, as the people of your-Nammu and Shulgi shared a common set of values and traditions, and the laws were designed to promote correct behavior within predetermined parameters. The scholar Samuel Noah Kramer describes the code as it appears in cuneiform script in columns on a clay tablet: According to Hammurabi`s code, if you knocked out someone else`s eye, he would pay with one of his own and also with a tooth. The laws of the Ur-Nammu Codex follow a fixed pattern, i.e.
Si (insert crime), then (insert penalty). This formula was followed by almost all the legal texts that came after the Ur-Nammu codex. The Code can distinguish between different categories of offences and the penalties that flow from them. For example, there are a number of capital crimes, such as murder, robbery and rape. The punishment for such crimes was death. For example, “If a man commits murder, that man must be killed” and “If a man violates the right of another and a young man`s virgin wife flourishes, they must kill that man.” The only aspect that the two codes had in common, besides the standard conditional formula (if-this-then-that), was the assertion that they had been received by the gods.