to sort out the many crimes and misdemeanours and disputes that
arose in the course of daily life in regional communities, the Laws
might have been regularly consulted in the search for precedents. But
the Laws were not prescriptive. Ultimately, it was up to the local
governor as judge and the local councils who advised him to decide
what judgments were appropriate in the cases brought before him.
Criminal activities dealt with in the Laws include homicide,
manslaughter, robbery, theft, arson, witchcraft and various
categories of forbidden sexual liaisons. One of the advantages of
the Laws being purely secular is that the provisions they contain
could be changed over the centuries, corresponding no doubt to
changing perceptions of the gravity of certain crimes. Milder
penalties for offences often replace earlier harsher ones. Distinctions
came to be made between offences committed with deliberate intent
to cause injury, and offences in which damage suffered by the victim
was an unintended consequence. If in fact the gods had given their
imprimateurto the original Laws, these could not have been so easily
altered to accommodate changing perceptions of crime and
punishment.
THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPENSATION
ThemostimportantfeatureoftheLawsistheprincipleof
compensation which underpins them. This marks a striking
departure from Hammurabic law, one of whose defining features
is thelex talionisprinciple–i.e. revenge for revenge’ssake,orin
biblical terms,‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’.Thus:
If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make
his work sound, and the house he constructs collapses and
causes the death of the householder, that builder shall be
killed.^4In Hittite law, the emphasis is not on retributive justice or
vengeance for its own sake, which is rarely of any material benefit
to the victim, but on compensatory justice. An offender will have
satisfied the demands of justice once he has discharged his legal
130 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA