Code of Lipit-Ishtar
A Sumerian-language code from the Isin dynasty argues that a king renews his legitimacy through divinely commanded justice, echoing the prologue formula of Ur-Nammu's earlier code and presenting law as inherited tradition rather than personal invention.
- Sumerian-language code from an increasingly Akkadian-speaking kingdom
- survival through Old Babylonian scribal school copies
- direct formulaic echo of Ur-Nammu's prologue
- structural template for Hammurabi's code
Composed in Sumerian, though by a king whose dynasty ruled a population increasingly speaking Akkadian, Lipit-Ishtar's code survives mainly through Old Babylonian scribal copies used as school exercises, with the actual stele, if one existed, lost. Its prologue explicitly credits the gods Anu and Enlil with commanding Lipit-Ishtar to 'establish justice in the land,' echoing Ur-Nammu's formula two centuries earlier, and its roughly thirty-eight surviving provisions cover inheritance, slavery, and property in language and structure that Hammurabi's later, far more extensive code would closely follow.
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