Middle Assyrian Laws

The Middle Assyrian Laws, also known as Assyrian law or the Code of the Assyrians, are an ancient Mesopotamian legal code developed in the Middle Assyrian Empire between roughly 1450 and 1250 BCE. The earliest surviving copy dates to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I, who ruled from 1114 to 1076 BCE, and was uncovered along with two further Assyrian legal collections during German Oriental Society excavations carried out between 1903 and 1914. The laws address a wide range of civil and criminal matters, with penalties that are generally harsher than those of comparable Sumerian and Babylonian codes, including mutilations such as the removal of the ears or nose, and they cover sexual conduct, marriage, adultery and divorce and other domestic matters in considerable detail; in cases of murder, the victim's family was given the power to decide whether the offender would be executed.