Reading the tablets…
Reading the tablets…
The corpus
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Among the oldest surviving written law collections. It provides an early witness to royal justice and specified compensation, rather than a starting date for law itself.
Law
Predates Hammurabi by roughly 150 years, recording Lipit-Eštar's mandate from An and Enlil to 'establish justice' — an early articulation of the Mesopotamian ideology that divine authority underwrites royal law-giving.