624 laws and legal codes: The Middle East for investigating an accusation were sometimes identified as “officials of the Place of Examination.” The only criminal hearings that are described in detail are the Great Tomb Robbery investigations of the late Twentieth Dynasty (ca 1196– 1070 b.c.e.) The robberies were a series of assaults by various gangs of thieves on the tombs and temples of western Thebes The vizier seems personally to have been involved in most criminal investigations and probably in all cases involving individuals of the official class In a legal proceeding the plaintiff was required to bring suit The tribunal then ordered the defendant to appear in court if a point of law seemed to be involved in the dispute Usually the judge ruled on the grounds of the documents and the testimony of each party Egyptian officials asserted that they always acted according to “what His Majesty loves” or to “what the king favors.” According to an Egyptian inscription, an ideal judge is “a man of justice before the Two Lands who causes two men to go out content with the utterance of his mouth.” According to the Teachings of Ptahhotep, an instructional text from the Old Kingdom (2575–2134 b.c.e.), whoever transgressed the laws was punished Reporting crime and criminal behavior was every official’s duty Failure to so was itself a crime and was punished almost as heavily as the original offense Punishments included property restrictions, imprisonment, beatings, tortures, and even mutilation Incarceration with hard labor is well documented, most notably in the Middle Kingdom records of the Great Prison at Thebes This and other prisons were not only places of confinement but also workhouses or labor camps Moreover, they served as places of detention for criminals awaiting harsher penalties For state officials the most serious punishments were loss of property, office, status, and even political and social identity, whereby an esteemed official was reduced to the status of a laborer in the fields The death penalty or severe mutilation of the face, nose, and ears was reserved for crimes against political or religious authorities Such capital offenses and rebellions lay outside the formal executive competence even of the vizier and required referral to the king himself THE MIDDLE EAST BY J AMES A CORRICK The ancient Near East produced the first known written laws, in the form of decrees handed down by kings Typically, they were first read to the populace and then inscribed on clay tablets Later, all the royal edicts of a particular ruler would be engraved on a stone pillar, called a stela The laws carved on the stelae were often organized in no particular order, with criminal and civil laws, covering a variety of legal issues, being mixed indiscriminately Crimes such as murder, thievery, and assault were addressed, as were civil issues, including inheritance, land ownership, and divorce Some codes also specified wages and prices and regulated the sale and treat- ment of slaves Each king’s legal code often superseded the laws of his predecessors This practice did not mean, however, that older laws were necessarily discarded Instead, laws from earlier codes were frequently brought forward and copied word for word by the new king In addition to these written legal codes, a large body of unwritten laws may also have existed These unwritten laws would have been passed down orally through the centuries Some would eventually have been incorporated into the written legal record It is remarkable that in the thousands of legal texts—records of judgments in cases of divorce, land sales, slave sales, and so on—the law code of Hammurabi is never referred to From the beginning much of ancient Near Eastern law was what would later be called lex talionis, or the law of equivalent retaliation Often described as a “tooth for a tooth” or an “eye for any eye,” lex talionis required the punishment to mirror the crime Thus a man who broke another’s arm had his own arm broken If he caused the death of someone else’s child, he had to give up the life of one of his own children However, it was not unusual for a fine to be substituted for the punishment Ancient Near Eastern law did not apply equally to all Aristocrats normally paid higher fines than commoners, while commoners were more likely to receive harsh punishment, such as flogging, or to be executed for capital crimes The earliest known legal code was that of the Mesopotamian king Urukagina (or Uruinimgina), who ruled the Sumerian city of Lagash beginning in 2351 b.c.e Concerned with rectifying social injustice, Urukagina forbade several practices in the collection of taxes Thus, for example, a priest or palace official could not take wood or fruit in tax payments from a poverty-stricken widow Law codes also survive from the early second millennium b.c.e., such as the laws of Eshnunna (modern-day Tell Asmar, Iraq) and the law code of the Mesopotamian ruler Lipit-Ishtar (r ca 1934–ca 1924 b.c.e.) The most famous code from the ancient Near East was that of Hammurabi (r 1792–1750 b.c.e.) At capital of Babylon, Hammurabi erected a polished black stela that stood feet tall In the 12th century b.c.e., Shutruk-Nahhunte, king of Elam, took the stela as booty back to his capital Susa, in southwestern Iran On one side of the stela was a relief showing the king conferring with Shamash, the god of justice; on the other was the code As was traditional with such legal codes, the divine inspiration of Hammurabi’s laws was made clear by a prologue in which the king explained how the gods of his city required justice and order and that the laws set down below were an attempt to meet these divine needs Like Urukagina, the Babylonian king set himself up as a protector of the weak Thus he sought justice by preventing the exploitation and victimization of the powerless and the destruction of the lawbreaker The prologue was followed by the laws themselves In 51 columns of cuneiform characters containing 282 laws, Hammurabi covered commercial and real estate dealings; personal