Hittite Laws

Context

The kingdom of the Hittites, Hatti, was located in Central Anatolia (roughly modern-day Turkey). At the height of their power, during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries bce, the Hittites ruled an extensive network of vassal states, stretching from the Aegean Sea in the west (the western coast of modern-day Turkey) to the Euphrates River in the east (present-day Iraq). Hatti, Egypt, Babylonia, and Mitanni were the major powers during this time. The kings wrote to each other in Akkadian, the language of Babylonia, which was the lingua franca—or language of international communication—in the ancient Near East.

This law collection exists in several manuscripts, which were copied over a period of time. As is the case with many ancient texts, both the author of the law collection and the events leading up to the writing of the text are unknown. Although the earliest copies date to the time of the Hittite Old Kingdom period (ca. 1650–1400 bce), Hittite scribes continued to make copies of the text through the Hittite New Kingdom period (ca. 1400–1180 bce). These cuneiform tablets were excavated from various sites at the capital city of Hattushash (modern-day Bogazköy), including the temple and the plateau of Büyükkale (meaning “Great Fortress” in Turkish), which contained the palace and several other important buildings. Because the Hittites normally wrote on clay tablets, which are fragile, no complete or even almost-complete copy of the laws exists. Modern-day scholars have painstakingly pieced together the text from fragments of several copies of the document.