The World's Oldest Written Law: From Sumer to Rome

Urukagina, the last king of the First Dynasty of Lagash in Sumer, issued these reforms around 2378 to 2368 BC as short lists of claims inscribed on clay cones in three differing recensions rather than a single unified code, including cutting the burial payment to undertakers from seven jugs of beer and 420 loaves of bread down to three jugs and 80 loaves.

Issued in Sumer around 2100 BCE under the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Code of Ur-Nammu is the oldest surviving written law code, and its casuistic if-then legal form became the template most later ancient Near Eastern codes followed; unlike Hammurabi's later lex talionis, most of its provisions impose monetary compensation in silver for bodily injury, reserving death for murder, robbery and adultery.

Lipit-Ishtar, fifth king of the Isin dynasty, issued this Sumerian-language code in the nineteenth century BCE; it survives as a prologue, roughly fifty provisions and an epilogue covering boat rental, agriculture, slavery, false testimony, foster care, apprenticeship, marriage and livestock rental, and it is the second-oldest known extant legal code after Ur-Nammu's.

Inscribed on cuneiform tablets in Akkadian and dated to around 1930 BC, the Laws of Eshnunna predate Hammurabi's code by roughly a century; the surviving nearly sixty sections, excavated at Tell Abu Harmal near Baghdad in 1945 and 1947, distinguish legal treatment between free persons and a subordinate class called the muskenum and include what is thought to be the earliest recorded legal provision addressing a dangerous dog, requiring its owner to restrain it or pay a fine if it caused a fatal injury.

Promulgated by Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, around 1754 BC, this code is inscribed on a basalt stele nearly two and a quarter meters tall, discovered at Susa in 1901 and now in the Louvre; its 282 laws cover commerce, property, family and criminal matters under a principle of proportional retribution often summarized as an eye for an eye, though penalties in practice varied by the social status of the parties involved.

Also called the Code of Nesilim, the roughly two hundred provisions of the Hittite Laws were in use across the Hittite Empire from about 1650 to 1100 BCE and survive in Old, Middle and Late Hittite copies that show the code was revised over centuries, including replacing capital punishment with monetary compensation in some later provisions, and it is notable for comparatively humane treatment of enslaved persons, who could marry by choice, own property, run businesses and buy their freedom.

Developed in the Middle Assyrian Empire between roughly 1450 and 1250 BCE, with the earliest surviving copy dating to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I, these laws imposed penalties generally harsher than comparable Sumerian and Babylonian codes, including mutilations such as the removal of the ears or nose, and in cases of murder gave the victim's family the power to decide whether the offender would be executed.

Issued by Horemheb, the last pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, and dictated directly to his scribes, this edict addressed corruption that had spread through Egypt under his predecessors, setting penalties for officials who abused their authority including beatings, exile, rhinotomy and death, and Horemheb also raised government salaries, appointed regional judges and forbade bribery in an attempt to reduce the pressure driving officials toward corruption.

Most often identified with the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Law of Moses spans material in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy including the Ten Commandments, regulations on property and family, dietary and purity rules and instructions for religious observance and sacrifice; modern biblical scholarship holds the Pentateuch is roughly half law and half narrative and recognizes multiple authors behind the text rather than Moses alone.

Promulgated around 621 to 620 BCE, Draco's Code was Athens's first written law code, replacing the arbitrary oral rulings of aristocratic judges, and it is remembered chiefly for its severity, prescribing death for a wide range of offenses, which gave rise to the word draconian; its one durable contribution, the first codified distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide, was the one part of the code Solon's reforms of 594 BCE preserved when they repealed nearly everything else.

Created by the Athenian statesman Solon in the early sixth century BC as the Athenian state was nearly falling apart under factional dissension, this constitution abolished all debts and freed debt-slaves in measures known as the Seisachtheia, reduced the power of the old aristocracy by making wealth rather than birth the criterion for holding office, and divided citizens into four classes based on land production; the only part of Draco's constitution Solon retained was its homicide law.

Traditionally dated to 451 and 449 BC, the Twelve Tables are the earliest known codification of Roman law; the Roman Republic appointed a commission of ten men, the decemviri, to record customary law into a fixed public text after plebeians agitated against arbitrary judgments handed down by patrician magistrates who alone knew the unwritten law, and Roman jurists continued to comment on and interpret its provisions for centuries as the foundational text of the civil law tradition that Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis would later systematize a thousand years afterward.