the First Dynasty of Babylon, and in particular the reign of its greatest ruler, Hammurabi.  When M. Maspero wrote his history, thousands of clay tablets, inscribed with legal and commercial documents and dated in the reigns of these early kings, had already been recovered, and the information they furnished was duly summarized by him.* But since that time two other sources of information have been made available which have largely increased our knowledge of the constitution of the early Babylonian state, its system of administration, and the conditions of life of the various classes of the population.

* Most of these tablets are preserved in the British Museum.  The principal?works in which they have been published are Cuneiform Texts in the British Museum (1896, etc.), Strassmaier’s Altbabylonischen Vertrage aus Warka, and Meissner’s Beitrage zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht.  A number of similar tablets of this period, preserved in the Pennsylvania Museum, will shortly be published by Dr. Ranke.

One of these new sources of information consists of a remarkable series of royal letters, written by kings of the First Dynasty, which has been recovered and is now preserved in the British Museum.  The letters were addressed to the governors and high officials of various great cities in Babylonia, and they contain the king’s orders with regard to details of the administration of the country which had been brought to his notice.  The range of subjects with which they deal is enormous, and there is scarcely one of them which does not add to our knowledge of the period.* The other new source of information is the great code of laws, drawn up by Hammurabi for the guidance of his people and defining the duties and privileges of all classes of his subjects, the discovery of which at Susa has been described in a previous chapter.  The laws are engraved on a great stele of diorite in no less than forty-nine columns of writing, of which forty-four are preserved,* and at the head of the stele is sculptured a representation of the king receiving them from Shamash, the Sun-god.

     * See King, Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, 3 vols.
     (1898-1900).

This code shows to what an extent the administration of law and justice had been developed in Babylonia in the time of the First Dynasty.  From the contracts and letters of the period we already knew that regular judges and duly appointed courts of law were in existence, and the code itself was evidently intended by the king to give the royal sanction to a great body of legal decisions and enactments which already possessed the authority conferred by custom and tradition.  The means by which such a code could have come into existence are illustrated by the system of procedure adopted in the courts at this period.  After a case had been heard and judgment had been given, a summary of the case and of the evidence, together with the judgment, was drawn up and written out on