Middle Assyrian Laws

Historical source page 13

12 Morris Jastrow, Jr. 'plebeians' 18 and 'slaves' by the side of 'freemen' who form a species of aristocracy. It is of course possible that in the missing portions of the Code the same distinctions were introduced, but their absence in the preserved portions is at least worth noticing. Society both in Babylonia and Assyria had passed beyond the stage of recognizing the 'clan' or kinsman as representing a social unit at the time when the two Codes now at our disposal were compiled, and it may well be that the further stage of a sharp division of classes was reached in the south long before it made its appearance in the north. Lastly, the new Code is of interest because of the additions that it furnishes to legal phraseology. Besides the terms above noted, we encounter here for the first time the term for debtor (feabbulu) as against bel hubulli for creditor — already known to us. We have the distinction between the amiranu, 'the eye witness', and the ismeanu 'the one who hears a report'. The person pledged for debt (tadindnu) and various officials for land transactions enter upon the scene. The term for the raising of loans (kldu) on deposits or on property is another interesting addition. Lying outside the strictly legal province, we have also the many new grammatical forms which show a wider divergence in the speech of the north during the second millennium from that of the south than we had hitherto sus- pected. 19 Reserving a further and more detailed study of the Code in comparison with the Hammurabi Code, in which the laws common to both will be placed in parallel columns and which will further reveal the different social conditions prevailing in Babylonia — so essentially a cultural power — as against those in a militaristic state like Assyria, let us now turn to the translation of the Code itself. ls See C. H. W. Johns on these distinctions in his valuable work on The Relations between the Laws of Babylonia and the Laws of the Hebrew Peoples (London 1914) p. 8. We owe to Johns the correct interpretation of the term MaS-En-Kak = muskcnu as the 'plebeian' in the Hammurabi Code. 19 The grammar of the Code merits a detailed study which will no doubt be undertaken by some Assyriologist. As a single illustration, we may call attention to the constant use of the ending uni in the plural of verbs, as in classical Arabic.