The Code of Ur-Nammu
The oldest surviving law code sets fines rather than mutilation.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Written around 2100 BCE at Ur, three centuries before Hammurabi, the code survives in fragments and lists offences with their penalties in a conditional form — if a man does this, then that follows. Notably, most bodily injuries are compensated with silver rather than answered in kind. It also opens with a claim that the king established equity and protected the orphan and the widow, a formula that recurs in Near Eastern law for two thousand years.