Middle Assyrian Laws

Historical source page 6

An Assyrian Law Code 5 tion of the German Orient Society, if happily some portions of the Code should have found their way to Constantinople, to which centre apparently all the finds made at Assur were shipped before the division was made with the Berlin Museum. German scholars can no doubt be depended upon to make a further search for frag- ments in the share of the tablets that were assigned to the Berlin Museum. II Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon the authorities of the German Orient Society for placing such portions of the Code as have been identified at the disposal of scholars, even before the appearance of the translation and interpretation which the editor, Dr. Otto Schroeder, announces as in preparation. The full credit to be given to him for his editio princeps will not be diminished if meanwhile independent translations of the Code published by him should be made by others. The importance of the Code for our knowledge of social conditions in ancient Assyria, as well as for purposes of comparison with the Hammurabi Code and for the fragments that we have of a Sumerian Code, forming the prototype for the compilation made by the scribes of Hammurabi, 13 not only justifies an immediate translation into English, but makes it desirable that independent renderings should be made accessible to those interested in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia and to students of the development of law and of legal institutions and procedure. The Code fairly bristles with difficulties, and it will be by the combined and independent efforts of many scholars only that we shall be able to reach a definite interpretation, and to solve the difficulties inherent in the many new terms revealed by the Code, in the complicated syntactical constructions as well as in the strange verbal and noun forms encountered. " The credit belongs to Professor Clay of having discovered and published the first fragment of such a Sumerian Code, forming No. 28 of the texts gathered by him in his splendid volume Miscellaneous Inscriptions in the Yale Babylonian Collection. Two further fragments in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum were published by Dr. H. F. Lutz in his volume of Selected Sumerian and Babylonian Texts (Philadelphia 1919) Nos. 101 and 102.