high status. A case in point is a king of Ugarit accused of seizing 400
donkeys, worth 4,000 shekels of silver, from a merchant caravan
passing through his land. He wasfined the substantial sum of one-
and-a-third talents of silver for this offence.^7 Indeed, many of the
cases judged in the courts of the Hittite viceroys concerned crimes
against merchants, including robbery, hijacking and murder. If the
offenders were not caught, the inhabitants of the districts, or their
authorities, where the crimes were committed, were obliged to pay
substantial compensation.
We are given a clear indication of the importance attached to
the safety of merchants from one of the few explicit references
made to these persons in the Hittite Laws. The penalty for
murdering a merchant is set at 4,000 shekels of silver (plus in
Hittite lands replacement of his goods) – far higher than the
penalties imposed for most other offences in the Laws. The relevant
clause (§5) clearly refers to intentional and premeditated homicide
by the perpetrator, the motive undoubtedly being to rob the
merchant of his goods. Interestingly, serious though the crime is,
the primary concern in this clause is not with the actual homicide.
It is the seizure of the merchant’s goods rather than his murder for
which the penalty is prescribed. Which illustrates a significant
feature of Hittite law–its emphasis on the protection of property,
and on obtaining compensation for a crime rather than
punishment for its own sake. Indeed, a later version of the clause
stipulates that if the merchant is killed without his goods in a
quarrel or accidentally–that is, robbery is not the motive for the
offence–the penalty is substantially reduced, to 240 and 80 shekels
of silver respectively. If the merchant is killed with his goods, the
perpetrator will pay, in addition to a substantialfine, compensation
worth three times the goods’value.
AFASCINATING GLIMPSE INTO THE WORLD OF THE COMMONER
The Laws provide important insights into many aspects of the daily
lives of those who inhabited the lower echelons of Hittite society.
Theirworld was one of which we have only faint glimpses from
other sources, for the Laws are above all concerned with the
134 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA