Babylonian law

Babylonian law is a branch of cuneiform law that has drawn substantial scholarly attention because of the volume of surviving evidence. Thousands of contracts survive, including deeds, conveyances, bonds, receipts, accounts and actual legal decisions handed down by judges, alongside inscriptions, royal charters and rescripts, dispatches, private letters and general literature that shed further light on legal practice, and grammatical and lexicographical texts have even preserved material such as the Sumerian family laws. The discovery of the Code of Hammurabi allowed far more systematic study of Babylonian law than would otherwise have been possible, though fragments of other, earlier codes survive and evidence for many points remains incomplete. Babylonian legal practice proved durable, persisting with little disruption to private life through Persian, Greek and Parthian rule, and it went on to influence Roman law; scholars distinguish the early law that predates the Code of Hammurabi from the later law of the Neo-Babylonian empire, and Assyrian law derived from Babylonian law while preserving some of its earlier features. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/