For jurisprudence, the starting point was a legal case, perhaps a
real case that had been judged by a court (as in the Nippur trial
reports above) or a fictitious case invented for the sake of argument.
Preferably it was a case that involved some delicate or liminal legal
point that would provide food for discussion and throw into relief
more commonplace rules. The case was then stripped of all non-
essential facts (e.g., the names of the parties, circumstances not rel-
evant to the decision) and turned into a theoretical hypothesis, with
its legal solution. Details of the hypothetical circumstances were then
altered to create a series of alternatives, for example, that would
change liability to non-liability, or would aggravate or mitigate the
penalty. That series of variations around a single case formed a schol-
arly problem, which could be used as a paradigm for teaching or
for further discussion. Over time, a canon of traditional problems
emerged that for several millennia was passed on from school to
school and society to society.1.2.4.5 Notwithstanding their small number, therefore, the law codes
point to a significant stream of juridical scholarship running through
the academies of the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamia, most of
this scholarly activity took place in the scribal schools, where the
cuneiform script was taught. Thus it is not surprising to find the law
codes in school copies. They may well represent only a small sam-
ple of the tradition, written or oral, from which they are drawn. As
we have seen, however, the codes are all associated with rulers,
human or divine, some actually being promulgated by named rulers.
Did this transformation also convert them into authoritative sources
of law, binding on the courts, and was their transmission as much
from one legal system to another as from one society to another?
This was the assumption of scholars when the cuneiform codes were
first discovered and continues to be the view of a number of legal
historians. It was challenged, however, by certain Assyriologists who
regarded them as no more than intellectual exercises, given their
affinity to the scholastic products of the scribal schools.^15 As for the
monumental aspect of LH (and, by implication, other codes in mon-
umental form), it has been argued that its purpose was a typical one(^15) The seminal article was by Kraus, “Ein zentrales Problem.. .,” elaborated by
Bottéro, “The ‘Code’...”
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