the means used to create legal obligations. Except perhaps toward
the very end of our period, documents had no independent role in
this regard. The thousands of “contractual” documents preserved are
not contracts as such; they are protocols of oral transactions made
usually before witnesses. The names of the witnesses to the oral pro-
ceedings were then appended to the document to ensure its authen-
ticity but also to provide a reference should a dispute arise. The
court would normally rely on the document as decisive evidence,
but that evidence could be rebutted by the testimony of the wit-
nesses to the transaction. Even international treaties, some of which
were committed to writing on tablets of silver and gold, derived their
authority from the solemn oaths taken by the parties before wit-
nesses. In this case, the documentation may have reached the level
of irrefutable evidence, but it was still no more than evidence of an
oral proceeding.
The situation of legislation and administrative orders is less clear.
A letter from the king giving an order was an oral statement dic-
tated to a scribe, to be repeated to the recipient by another scribe.
Laws were committed to writing in monumental form or in multi-
ple copies for distribution and are sometimes referred to as “the
word of the stele/tablet.” They could equally be referred to as “the
word of ” the lawgiver. The ambiguity of the evidence is epitomized
by HL 55, which records that in response to a delegation of feudal
tenants, “the father of the king [stepped] into the assembly and sealed
a deed (regarding?) them: ‘Go! You shall do like your colleagues.’”
Was the procedure therefore oral, or written, or both?^10
Accordingly, in assessing the sources of legal authority in the
ancient Near East, we must not only take into account oral as well
as written forms. We must also recognize that the document in which
the source is now found would not necessarily have played the same
role as in modern law and may not have been identical with the
authoritative source itself.(^10) The historical preamble of the Edict of Telipinu is separated from the nor-
mative rules by the statement: “Then I, Telipinu, called an assembly in Hattusa”
(§27:34). Neither here nor in HL 55 is the particle of direct speech used for the
decree.
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