Position in chronology
Code of Lipit-Ishtar
Translation — curated editorial
EditorialIf a man's slave-woman has borne him a child, and the master has given her her freedom, but the child has not been received as an heir, that child is free…
Editorial entry — translation cited from: Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd ed., 1997), pp. 23–35
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Why it matters
One of the earliest law codes after the Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BCE), and the closest direct predecessor of Hammurabi's better-known code. Lipit-Ishtar's code is written in Sumerian — by this period a learned tongue, no longer spoken in daily life — and uses monetary compensation for personal injury, in continuity with Ur-Nammu. The legal tradition is Sumerian; Hammurabi's later innovation is largely to translate it into Akkadian and add the lex talionis.
Transliteration
tukum-bi nita-e dam guruš lú-da nu-ta? in-tuk … (Sumerian legal protasis-apodosis formula, fragmentary across exemplars)
Scholarly note
Promulgated by Lipit-Ishtar, fifth king of the Isin dynasty, around 1934 BCE. The text survives across multiple tablet exemplars from Nippur scribal schools, mostly Old Babylonian copies of the original Sumerian text. Roth (1997) reconstructs about fifty preserved clauses out of an estimated original two hundred. The structure is the conditional-clause format that Hammurabi will adopt a century and a half later, in Akkadian: 'If a man does X, then …'
Attribution
Image: Penn Museum / Istanbul Museums · imagery to be sourced at next ingestion pass.
Translation excerpted from Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd ed., 1997), pp. 23–35.
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