Israeli archaeologists have for the first time uncovered a fragment of a document containing a law code which parallels that of the ancient Code of Hammurabi, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced Monday.
The fragment, dating from the 18th-17th centuries BC, was discovered during excavations at Hazor, in the last few weeks. The fragments, written in Akkadian cuneiform script, likely refer to issues of personal injury law relating to slaves and masters, as gleaned from the words deciphered so far, which include “master,” “slave,” and a word referring to bodily parts, apparently the word for “tooth.”
“The document we have uncovered includes laws pertaining to body parts and damages. These laws are similar to laws in the Hammurabi Codex, as well as to laws along the lines of ‘an eye for an eye,’ mentioned in Exodus,” said Professor Amnon Ben-Tor of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology. Ben-Tor and Dr. Sharon Zuckerman are heading the team of archaeologists at Tel Hazor who made the find.
The Code of Hammurabi is an ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC in ancient Babylon. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, and consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting “an eye for an eye” as graded depending on social status, of slave versus free man.
The Hazor law code fragments are being prepared for publication by a team headed by Professor Wayne Horowitz of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. At this stage, it is difficult to determine whether this document was actually written at Hazor, where a school for scribes was located, or brought from somewhere else,” Horowitz said.
Hazor was linked to the several ancient kingdoms of the region such as Mari and Babylonia. “The document found confirms what we know about Hazor from Mesopotamia and Syria. We know that there were scribes in Hazor that came out of the scribal tradition of their period, which was accepted in Babylonia and Syria,” Horowitz said. “We are just at the beginning of deciphering the document, and it will take time until we reach an optimal decipherment.”
Since excavations at Hazor, in northern Israel, began in the 1950s, 19 cuneiform documents have been found – the largest collection of such documents unearthed in Israel in one site. Other documents that have been found include a bilingual text, a multiplication table, and legal and economic documents.
Ben-Tor says that the wide variety of texts indicates that Hazor was an important learning and administrative center at the time, where high-quality scribes worked.
Source: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
