The Ur-Nammu Codex is the oldest known legal code preserved today. It originated in Mesopotamia and is written on tablets in the Sumerian language around 2100-2050 BC. Although it is known that earlier legal texts existed, such as the Urukagina Codex, it is the oldest legal text. It preceded the Code of Hammurabi by about three centuries. 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. The codex of your-Nammu was attributed to your-Nammu because the laws of the prologue are directly attributed to him.
However, some scholars have argued that the Code of Law was written by Shulgi, the son and successor of your-Nammu. In any case, your-Nammu was a king of the Sumerian city-state of Ur. The Code of Hammurabi was understood as the oldest code of law in the world until 1947, when the Code of Lipit-Ishtar was discovered, and then, in 1948, the tablet of the Codex of your-Nammu was excavated in Iraq. This was translated by Kramer in 1952 and unearthed the oldest legal code in the world. Kramer comments: The only aspect that the two codes had in common, besides the standard conditional formula (if-this-then-that), was the claim that they had been received by the gods. This feature appeared in later legal texts such as those of the Assyrians and the Mosaic Law of the Bible. Just as your-Nammu Shamash attributed the authorship of his code, Moses is portrayed as having received his own from Yahweh. 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: The stele was packed and shipped to the Louvre in Paris, and in less than a year it was translated and widely published as the first example of a written code of law – one that was older but had striking parallels with the laws of the Hebrew Old Testament.
The law also provided for fines for crimes, which were to be dealt with much more severely under the subsequent Hammurabi Code. In the your-Nammus code, two offences in particular are noteworthy: Subsequently, other fragments of the code were searched. Those found in your, for example, were translated in 1965 and led to the reconstruction of about 40 laws. Fragments have also been discovered in another Sumerian city, Sippar, although with some slight variations of the text. Instead, courts relied on traditional methods – such as torture – to establish guilt or innocence, and then imposed whatever punishment they deemed appropriate. The Code of Lipit-Ishtar seems to have been created primarily to manage disputes arising from problems of inheritance, inheritance and debt slavery, and although the upper class may have strictly followed the laws as written, villages, towns and cities seem to have regarded it as a guideline rather than a code of law. if they recognized it. 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.” 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. Hammurabi, following the example of your-Nammu, claimed that his laws had been given to him by the god Shamash and had a stele engraved with these laws, crowned by an image of Shamash who had given them to the king, placed in the town square, where anyone who could read had access to them; Those who could not, would have made them read it. Ignorance of the law is therefore no excuse to break it, because the laws have been promulgated publicly and can be consulted at any time.
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