Closely connected are other questions as to the status of women. Already in 1892 J. Oppert was able to make out much about Liberté de la femme à Babylone in the Revue d’Assyriologie, ii, pp. 89-90. V. Marx discussed Die Stellung der Frauen in Babylonien in the Beiträge zur Assyriologie, iv, pp. 1-77.
Slavery in Babylonia was very different from either Roman or modern ideals. As long ago as 1888 J. Oppert had made out much from the legal documents of later times in his article La condition des esclaves à Babylone in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres for that year. Br. Meissner had written a dissertation in 1882, De servitute babylonico-assyriaca (Leipzig), which still deserves to be consulted. M. Schorr wrote Arbeitsruhetage im alten Babylonien in Revue Sémitique, 1912, pp. 398-9.
The questions of guarantee, security, &c., are finely treated by P. Koschaker in his work, Babylonisch-assyrisches Bürgschaftsrecht (Leipzig, Teubner, 1911).
Business in general is well dealt with by Fr. Delitzsch in his Handel und Wandel in Altbabylonien (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1910). Die Commenda im islamischen Rechte, by J. Kohler (Würzburg, Stahel, 1885), is to be compared.
Aus dem altbabylonischen Recht, by Br. Meissner, in Der alte Orient, vii, Heft 1, 1905 (Leipzig, Hinrichs), is excellent.
On the whole subject of Babylonian law a valuable treatise is P. Koschaker’s article, The Scope and Methods of a History of Assyrio-Babylonian Laws in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1913, pp. 230-43. Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts, and Letters, by the present writer, in The Library of Ancient Inscriptions (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1904), and the articles on Babylonian Law, by the same author, in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. iii, 1910, may be consulted, pp. 115-21, and in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. The French jurist, Ed. Cuq, in his Notes d’épigraphie et de papyrologie, published in the Nouvelle Revue historique du droit français et étranger (Paris, L. Larose), 1906-1909, discussed many points of Le Droit babylonien au temps de la Première Dynastie de Babylone.
Lexicography of the Code.
Most of the discussions and editions above referred to deal with points in the lexicography. The edition by Ungnad in his Band II, named on p. 68, gives the latest results of the investigations in this domain. A few other works deserving of note will be added here.
The meaning of amêlu was elucidated by H. Winckler in his Altorientalische Forschungen, ii, pp. 312-15, 1901 (Leipzig, Pfeiffer).
The difficult word mushkênu, rendered noble by Scheil and after him by Dareste and others, was given this meaning because the fines and penalties inflicted on him in the Code seemed to be less than those inflicted on the ordinary man. The ideogram used in the Code was not rendered into Semitic Babylonian by Scheil, but first in print by H. Zimmern. A crowd of extraordinary guesses as to the meaning of the term were hazarded, founded on the cognate languages. Thus it was discussed by E. Littmann in Zur Bedeutung von miskên, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, vol. xvii, pp. 262-5 (Strassburg, K. J. Trübner, 1903), who made it out to be leper and by Et. Combe in Babyloniaca, vol. iii, pp. 73-4, who settled the meaning from its use in modern Arabic. The present writer had already anticipated much of this in his Oldest Code and the Notes on the Hammurabi Code, above, p. 70.