sources for the legal section of LH and those of EAE63, in that rather codified language
may be less prone to variation. It certainly appears from the evidence presented here that
manuscripts of LH which contain the codified legal material are more likely to agree than
manuscripts that contain the poetic material.
From this we may be inclined to conclude that the poetic sections of LH were more likely
to be transmitted by scribes with some degree of stylistic freedom, while the actual laws
were copied with relatively more precision. However, there is no solid indication that the
laws themselves were always copied with a very high degree of exactitude. Rather, the
syntactical structure and sequence of the laws were transmitted relatively intact, but the
linguistic and orthographic style of the scribe could still have an impact on the final form
of the reproduction. Indeed, the Haupttext and AO10237, a contemporary exemplar, can
be shown to disagree in stylistic, linguistic and orthographic aspects, and so we may ex-
pect that similar types of variation between the first millennium sources would have been
quite common.
In reality we lack any significant overlap between the poetic and legal sections in the first
millennium manuscripts, and so it is currently impossible to say definitively whether or
not the law section was transmitted differently to the prologue and epilogue. It may be
that our sources for the poetic sections would be found to vary in the legal section too if it
was also preserved. The only manuscript to preserve such an overlap is tablet e, which
holds a significant portion of the epilogue as well as the last two lines of the preceding
legal section. This source shows comparable levels of variation between the legal and po-