CHAPTER 14

Justice and the

Commoner

THEHITTITELAWS

A

collection of 200 laws provides us with our best source of
information on how Hittite society worked, and on the
daily lives and moral and social values of its members.
The collection was copied many times, and though none of its
copies have survived intact, we can put together an almost
complete version of it by piecing together the various bits and
pieces that still exist.^1 In many respects, the Laws are modelled on
the so-called‘Code’ of the eighteenth-century Babylonian king
Hammurabi. Carved on a basalt stone column, the one surviving
(largely complete) copy of Hammurabi’s Laws is now on display in
the Louvre in Paris. One thing we do need to stress is that it’s quite
misleading to use the term‘Code’to apply to either the Babylonian
or the Hittite Laws, since they’re no more than a sample gathering
of legal precedents, cherry-picked from a large number of cases
dealing with similar matters brought to court and judged on
previous occasions.
Both the Babylonian and the Hittite collections of laws cover a
wide range of activities of both a civil and a criminal nature. And
like their Babylonian predecessor, the Hittite Laws are expressed as
conditional statements:If(someone does/suffers something),then
(this will be the consequence). No doubt each official presiding in a
court of justice had a copy of the Laws at his disposal, to see what