The oldest surviving law code on earth — c. 2100 BCE, three centuries before Hammurabi.
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Tradition
Sumerian legal text. Casuistic “if-then” case laws; the prologue frames the king as an instrument of divine justice. Predates the Code of Hammurabi by ~300 years.
Translation
Prologue and surviving laws as quoted in the Wikipedia article *Code of Ur-Nammu* (en.wikipedia.org), drawing on the Kramer 1952 reconstruction of Ni 3191 and subsequent fragments. For the complete scholarly edition see Martha T. Roth, *Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor*, 2nd ed. (SBL Writings from the Ancient World 6, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), pp. 13-22.
License
Selected text reproduced from English Wikipedia under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Recommended scholarly edition: Roth 1997.