ABSTRACT
The texts designated “law collections” from ancient Mesopotamia are compositions written in the cuneiform script on clay tablets and stone monuments, in the Semitic language Akkadian (in various Babylonian and Assyrian dialects) and in Sumerian. 1 The distinguishing feature of the law collections is that they include provisions understood by modern scholars to be either aspirational or reflections of social and legal practice and reality. The compositions entered into the scribal schools and, as such, for generations were a means of training the classes of bureaucrats and scholars who served in the royal palace and temples; while advancing through the scribal curriculum, copying and memorizing school texts, students absorbed the vocabulary, the formulations and the fundamental concepts of legal rules. 2 While they thus may reflect the legal practices or norms that were in operation at a particular time, they were also the models—in both form and content—for the creation of new compositions.
