This book highlights and explains consistent differences in both the framing and content of the various pre-first millennium BC law collections of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Hatti. The differences between collections are placed in the broader background of the worldview and political make-up of the societies and individuals that created them, and their historical context. This has yielded a number of interesting results. For example, Mesopotamian law collections do not explicitly acknowledge changes within the law (correlating with an idea in Mesopotamia that the correct ways of doing things were handed from gods to men in the beginning) whereas the Hittite law collection does (correlating with the Hittite tendency to acknowledge change in their history writing in order to teach lessons). These differences correlate with the contrasting ruling systems of the two cultures (Mesopotamia tending towards a more centralised society).

This comparison demonstrates that the ancient Near East was not a uniform culture, and calls into question the oft-stated “truism” that the various collections freely borrowed material from each other. While there is much congruity in terms of topics covered (especially amongst the southern Mesopotamian collections), there is very little compelling evidence for specific instances of literary borrowing amongst the laws themselves.

Samuel Jackson is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney and a History Teacher at Sydney Church of England Grammar School. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney.