Neo-babylonian court procedure.

• Author: Wells, Bruce
• Position: Book review

Nee-Babylonian Court Procedure, By SHALOM E. HOURZ. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 38. Leiden: BRILL, 2009. Pp. xiii + 335. $170.

In this book Holtz argues that a careful and thorough identification of the different types of documents issued within the Neo-Babylonian judicial system allows for a reconstruction of that period's judicial procedure. In other words, the different types of documents reveal the different stages of the trial process. While the judicial procedure of other periods of Mesopotamian history (Ur III, Old Babylonian, Nuzi, Neo-Assyrian) had already been the subject of book-length analyses, that of the Neo-Babylonian or, perhaps better, Late Babylonian period (ca. 600-450 B.c.E.), one of the best documented in ancient history in general, was ripe for an extensive and systematic treatment. Holtz's work thus fills a longstanding lacuna in Assyriological scholarship and will undoubtedly prove a useful resource for years to come.

One of Holtz's main goals in the book is to put together a picture of what he calls the "tablet trail." This involves grouping "litigation records together into text-types based on similarity of legal function" (p. 4). The result is -a textual record of the different procedures involved-in the adjudication of cases (p. 20). Thus, even though most of the texts in the corpus reveal only a portion of the trial or set of proceedings that stand behind them, Holtz wants to reconstruct the full course of a trial by allowing each text to inform us about the stage of the trial that it represents. Part I of the book is devoted, therefore, to the classification of text-types. In part II one finds Holtz's reconstruction of the stages of Neo-Babylonian judicial procedure, which he bases on the text-types identified in part I.

Holtz begins with records that appear to recount a trial from beginning to end; he calls these "decision records." He identifies four different styles or formats for these texts; two come from cases involving the royal judges, and two from cases heard at the Eanna temple in Uruk. Interestingly, some cases drawn up in the "royal judges" styles are adjudicated by temple officials, and some "Eanna" style cases are adjudicated by royal judges. What Holtz is able to show is that the style of a decision record depends on which individual or institution prevailed in the dispute and was thus the party that would keep the document for use, if necessary, in the future. Documents in the "royal judges"...