Prawa (Dādušy z) Ešnunny
LAWS OF (DADUŠA OF) EŠNUNNA

Summary/Abstract: The Laws of Eshnunna, which can now be attributed with a large dose of certainty to Daduša, the king of this country, who reigned at the turn of the 19th and the 18th century BC, constitute the earliest collection of law written in Akkadian. They are not preserved on an original stele, like the Laws of Hammurabi, however, they are available in the form of copies on three clay tablets, which were unearthed in the 20th century AD, and they only contain apart of the original text. The preserved paragraphs mainly pertain to economic and family matters, and in this context they are similar, to a large extent, to the prescriptions of the Laws of Hammurabi. Therefore, it has been suggested sometimes that the two collections are related to each other as legal monuments. However, upon closer inspection of the language of the Laws of Eshnunna and of the Laws of Hammurabi, one can say that the former collection, written down barely a few decades earlier, did not influence the former to a significant extent or even at all. Similar cases and solutions in both collections may rather indicate that closely related customary law existed in both countries, Eshnunna and Babylonia.

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