Hittite laws

A Hittite tablet found at Hattusa, believed to be a legal deposition.

The Hittite laws have been preserved on a number of Hittite cuneiform tablets found at Hattusa (CTH 291-292, listing 200 laws). Copies have been found written in Old Hittite as well as in Middle and Late Hittite, indicating that they had validity throughout the duration of the Hittite Empire (ca. 1650–1100 BCE).

The corpus

The laws are formulated as case laws; they start with a condition, and a ruling follows, e.g. "If anyone tears off the ear of a male or female slave, he shall pay 3 shekels of silver". The laws show an aversion to the death penalty, the usual penalty for serious offenses being enslavement to forced labour. They are preserved on two separate tablets, each with approximately 200 clauses, the first categorised as being ‘of a man’; the second ‘of a vine’; a third set may have existed.

The laws may be categorised into eight groups of similar clauses. These are separated for the most part by two types of seemingly orphaned clauses: Sacral or incantatory clauses, and afterthoughts.

These eight main groups of laws were:

I Aggression and assault: Clauses 1 - 24
II Marital relationships: Clauses 26 - 38
III Obligations and service - TUKUL: Clauses 39 - 56
IV Assaults on property and theft: Clauses 57 - 144
V Contracts and prices: Clauses 145 - 161
VI Sacral matters: Clauses 162 - 173
VII Contracts and tariffs: Clauses 176 - 186
VIII Sexual relationships - HURKEL: Clauses 187 - 200
- Including the criminalisation of bestiality (except with horses and mules).^[1] The death penalty was a common punishment among sexual crimes.

The Hittite laws were kept in use for some 500 years, and many copies show that, other than changes in grammar, what might be called the 'original edition' with its apparent disorder, was copied slavishly; no attempt was made to 'tidy up' by placing even obvious afterthoughts in a more appropriate position.

This corpus and the classification scheme is based on findings arising out of a Master of Arts degree taken at the University of Queensland by N H Dewhirst, supervised by Dr Trevor Bryce in 2004.

Changes were apparently made to penalties at least twice: firstly, the kara – kinuna changes, which generally reduced the penalties found in a former, but apparently unpreserved, 'proto-edition'; and secondly, the ‘Late Period’ changes to penalties in the already-modified Old Hittite version.

Modern editions

The laws were first fully published by Bedřich Hrozný in 1922. Johannes Friedrich published a new edition in 1959 and the latest critical edition was published by Harry Hoffner in 1997.

External links

The Code of the Nesilim, c. 1650-1500 BCE (Excerpts)

Literature

E. Neu, StBoT 26 (1983)
Harry Angier Hoffner Jr., The Laws of the Hittites: a Critical Edition (DMOA 23) – Leiden, New York, Köln 1997

References

↑ Peake's commentary on the Bible, Revised Edition (1962), ad Exodus 22:19

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