Legal Reform

4 minutes • 687 words

The laws were enacted on the authority of the god Nannar. They were aimed at stopping and punishing “the grabbers of the citizens’ oxen, sheep, and donkeys” so that:

“the orphan shall not fall prey to the wealthy
the widow shall not fall prey to the powerful
the man of 1 shekel shall not fall prey to a man of 60 shekels.”

Urnammu also decreed “honest and unchangeable weights and measurements.”

But the Sumerian legal system, and the enforcement of justice, go back even farther in time.

By 2600 B.C. so much must already have happened in Sumer that the ensi Urukagina found it necessary to institute reforms.

The reform decree of Urukagina listed the reforms, preceded by the evils of his time:

the unfair use by supervisors of their powers to take the best for themselves
the abuse of official status
the extortion of high prices by monopolistic groups.

All such injustices, and many more, were prohibited by the reform decree.

An official could no longer set his own price “for a good donkey or a house.”

A “big man” could no longer coerce a common citizen.

The rights of the blind, poor, widowed, and orphaned were restated. A divorced woman—nearly 5,000 years ago—was granted the protection of the law.

Urukagina claimed that it was his god Ningirsu who called on him “to restore the decrees of former days.”

The Sumerian laws were upheld by a court system in which the proceedings and judgments as well as contracts were meticulously recorded and preserved.

The justices acted more like juries than judges.

A court was usually made up of 3 or 4 judges:

one was a professional “royal judge”
the others drawn from a panel of 36 men.

While the Babylonians made rules and regulations, the Sumerians were concerned with justice.

They believed that the gods appointed the kings primarily to assure justice in the land.

Before the Hebrews had kings, they were governed by judges.

Kings were judged not by their conquests or wealth but by the extent to which they “did the righteous thing.”

In the Jewish religion, the New Year marks a ten-day period during which the deeds of men are weighed and evaluated to determine their fate in the coming year.

It is probably more than a coincidence that the Sumerians believed that a deity named Nanshe annually judged Mankind in the same manner; after all, the first Hebrew patriarch—Abraham—came from the Sumerian city of Ur, the city of Ur-Nammu and his code.

The Sumerian concern with justice or its absence also found expression in what Kramer called “the first ‘Job.’”

Matching together fragments of clay tablets at the Istanbul Museum of Antiquities, Kramer was able to read a good part of a Sumerian poem which, like the biblical Book of Job, dealt with the complaint of a righteous man who, instead of being blessed by the gods, was made to suffer all manner of loss and disrespect.

“My righteous word has been turned into a lie,” he cried out in anguish.

In its second part, the anonymous sufferer petitions his god in a manner akin to some verses in the Hebrew Psalms:

My god, you who are my father, who begot me—lift up my face… How long will you neglect me, leave me unprotected… leave me without guidance?

Then follows a happy ending. “The righteous words, the pure words uttered by him, his god accepted… his god withdrew his hand from the evil pronouncement.”

Preceding the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes by some two millennia, Sumerian proverbs conveyed many of the same concepts and witticisms.

If we are doomed to die—let us spend; If we shall live long—let us save. When a poor man dies, do not try to revive him. He who possesses much silver, may be happy; He who possesses much barley, may be happy; But who has nothing at all, can sleep! Man: For his pleasure: Marriage; On his thinking it over: Divorce. It is not the heart which leads to enmity; it is the tongue which leads to enmity. In a city without watchdogs, the fox is the overseer.