Laws of Eshnunna
A rival Mesopotamian kingdom's law collection argues, a generation before Hammurabi, that price ceilings and fixed compensation tables can regulate an economy just as effectively as they resolve individual disputes.
- price controls as the opening concern of the code
- fixed monetary compensation for injury
- excavated findspot at Tell Harmal, ancient Shaduppum
- part of the shared casuistic tradition running from Ur-Nammu to Hammurabi, though not a directly attested textual source for either
Predating Hammurabi's code by roughly two decades, the Akkadian-language Laws of Eshnunna survive on two tablets excavated at Tell Harmal, opening not with narrative or theology but with a price list, fixed rates for grain, oil, wool, and hired transport, before moving into around sixty case laws covering theft, marriage, and bodily injury compensated by fixed silver payments. Its systematic, almost administrative tone and its place in the same casuistic legal tradition that runs from Ur-Nammu through Lipit-Ishtar to Hammurabi, a shared genre convention rather than an attested chain of textual borrowing at every step, make it a crucial data point for how Mesopotamian law developed across two centuries.
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