La ley mds antigua: Textos legates sumerios.

• Author: Karahashi, Fumi
• Position: Reviews of Books

La ley mds antigua: Textos legates sumerios. By MANUEL MOLINA. Pliegos de Oriente. Barcelona: EDICIONES DE LA UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA, 2000. Pp. 186.

This compact book presents a wealth of Sumerian texts dealing with law and juridical matters in Spanish translation. The book can be divided into three parts. The first (pp. 9-42) is an introduction in which the author talks about the historical background, writing and literature, legal texts ("law codes," edicts, and practical legal texts), and school texts. The second part (pp. 45-110) consists of five texts: "Reforms" of UruKAgina, Laws of Ur-Namma, Laws of Lipit-Istar, Laws of an unknown king (probably Ur-Namma), and a collection of legal provisions, namely FLP 1287. Each text is preceded by an introduction in which the author places the text in its historical context, discusses textual problems, and gives a summary of the text, history of research, and other translations. For the first three texts, all the text sources are listed with museum number and edition. (Unfortunately, the museum sigla are not given in the abbreviations.) The third part (pp. 111-63) contains forty-eight selected legal documents. These documents--sales, loans, and court procedures--are classified according to subject matter, such as real estate (nos. 1-7), slaves (nos. 8-23), animals (nos. 24-27), marriage (nos. 28-35), inheritance (nos. 36-37), and other (nos. 38-48)--including a river ordeal and a tag attached to a basket of di-til-la (court procedure) tablets. Chronologically they range from the Pre-Sargonic (three texts) and the Sargonic (nine texts) to the Ur III period (thirty-six texts). In addition to a translation, each text is provided with information about editions, date and provenance, and a brief sumary of the contents. The reader will appreciate the summary, since it is not always easy to understand what a terse text is dealing with. The author provides, throughout the book, adequate, up-to-date notes and discusses important issues and points of differing opinion, such as on p. 110 n. 9. At the end of the book are found a helpful bibliography and a glossary.

The following are minor corrections and suggestions:

pp. 46f.: I do not see any need to give new designations (A, B, C, D) to the manuscripts. They seem to be superfluous--even the author himself refers to the texts using the commonly employed designations. The two tables of text sources can be combined into one because descriptions of the types...