The Hammurabi code and the Sinaitic legislation / with a complete translation of the great Babylonian inscription discovered at Susa, by Chilperic Edwards.

Hammurabi

Date:: 1904

Credit: The Hammurabi code and the Sinaitic legislation / with a complete translation of the great Babylonian inscription discovered at Susa, by Chilperic Edwards. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$was only employed for sculptures and formal inscriptions. The contract tablets and the correspondence of the period were written in a simplified style called the Old Babylonian Cursive, very similar to the Assyrian Cunei- form usually met with in printed books. The clay tablets appear to have been written and read in horizontal lines, running from left to right. But the inscription of Hammurabi is in rows of short columns, the characters in the columns being read from top to bottom, and the columns themselves running from right to left. In fact, the direction of the writing is exactly the same as in Chinese, to which the Archaic Cuneiform bears a remark- able resemblance. The hard stone of which the monument is composed has preserved the original writing with extreme sharpness, and the three fragments fit together so closely that very little is lost by the fractures. The greatest damage has been done to the inscrip- tion, not by accident, but by design, for the last five rows of columns upon the front have been purposely scraped out. This erasure was not made because any of the laws were objected to, but because the monarch who removed the pillar from Babylonia to Susa wished to engrave his own name upon it as$