ABSTRACT
Little has been written recently about the role of law in early societies from an anthropological standpoint, at least in a Mesopotamian context, and yet much remains to be said. Perhaps the Mesopotamian historians have thought too much about laws, at the expense of law. The Code of Hammurapi is justly famous, and has been joined by earlier, shorter, texts which also deserve to be considered as collections of laws. Not surprisingly, the nature of these collections, and the legal principles and practices they reveal, have been much studied. A great deal of this work is by legal historians, many of them of the German school, and trained in the traditions of Roman law; and the entirely proper concerns of that discipline have discouraged approaches from other angles. For the general historian, the laws are a poor mirror of the role of law in society: they are either traditional provisions, likely to be overtaken by social change, or attempts by the current authority to reform or update. Either way, they are likely to give a distorted picture of conditions, being either atypical or unreal. This chapter will therefore concentrate first on reconstructing how law operated within society, so as to have a context against which to assess the collections of laws to which the rulers have so insistently drawn our attention. Law need not be written down, and self-evidently could not have been in earlier times, so that it will not be possible to recover the full picture, but we are witnessing in Mesopotamia at this time the gradual assimilation of written practices by the legal system, and this is a process which deserves examination in its own right. 494
