ABSTRACT
No collection of laws comparable in scope to the Code of Hammurabi has been found in Assyria. Just as in Babylonia there existed tablets on each of which the legislation dealing with a specific subject was inscribed. From the ruins of Assur one of these documents, written in the later half of the second millennium, has been retrieved almost undamaged. It gathers into some fifty articles the penalties awaiting certain delinquents, particularly if a freeman's wife had been smitten or outraged. Another tablet of the same epoch, unfortunately broken, deals with rural law. A third, in a still worse state of preservation, contains decisions relating to theft and groups therewith mercantilism. 1 From the closing years of the monarchy Ashurbanipal's library furnishes a certain number of documents, an analysis of which gives us a glimpse of what the legislation may then have been.
