Hittite Laws

Impact

Given the uncertainty about the authorship, context, and audience of the Hittite Laws, its impact in its own day cannot be estimated. Because no record of the law collection exists, from the time of the fall of the Hittite Empire in the twelfth century bce to the time of its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, it is unlikely to have had any significant impact during the interim period. Since the first modern edition of the Hittite Laws appeared in 1922, however, scholars have been interested in four aspects of the law collection: orthography (the way the cuneiform signs are written), language, comparative law, and society and its values.

Because the Hittite Laws exist in several manuscripts, copied over many years, scholars can look at developments in orthography over time. Orthography is important in helping to date texts. Scholars can compare the orthography of an undated text to the orthography from known time periods to estimate when a text may have been written.

Then, too, by looking at the differences in the various copies of the Hittite Laws, scholars are able to study the development of the Hittite language itself— in terms of grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Because Hittite is one of the oldest known members of the Indo-European family of languages, the laws provide one source of data for looking at the development of this language family.

The Hittite Laws can be directly compared with Mesopotamian legal collections, but they are of particular interest to scholars of biblical law. Of all the ancient Near Eastern legal collections, for example, only the Hittite and the biblical law collections are concerned with regulating sexual pairings that are innately unacceptable in these two cultures. This is not surprising, given that both cultures seemed to regard sexual relations in general as somehow defiling a person. Further, these two law collections are the only ones that regulate bestiality; while it is unacceptable in all forms under biblical law, Hittite law forbids only sexual relationships with cattle, sheep, pigs, or dogs.

Scholars have used the Hittite Laws in conjunction with other texts to attempt to discern aspects of Hittite society and values. The law collection in conjunction with various known rituals shows that the Hittites valued purity. And, on the basis of the reduction in fines or lessening of the severity of the penalties, Alfonso Archi argues that the Hittites were more humane than their neighbors.