tablets in due legal form and phraseology.  A list of the witnesses was appended, and, after the tablet had been dated and sealed, it was stored away among the legal archives of the court, where it was ready for production in the event of any future appeal or case in which the recorded decision was involved.  This procedure represents an advanced stage in the system of judicial administration, but the care which was taken for the preservation of the judgments given was evidently traditional, and would naturally give rise in course of time to the existence of a recognized code of laws.

Moreover, when once a judgment had been given and had been duly recorded it was irrevocable, and if any judge attempted to alter such a decision he was severely punished.  For not only was he expelled from his judgment-seat, and debarred from exercising judicial functions in the future, but, if his judgment had involved the infliction of a penalty, he was obliged to pay twelve times the amount to the man he had condemned.  Such an enactment must have occasionally given rise to hardship or injustice, but at least it must have had the effect of imbuing the judges with a sense of their responsibility and of instilling a respect for their decisions in the minds of the people.  A further check upon injustice was provided by the custom of the elders of the city, who sat with the judge and assisted him in the carrying out of his duties; and it was always open to a man, if he believed that he could not get justice enforced, to make an appeal to the king.  It is not our present purpose to give a technical discussion of the legal contents of the code, but rather to examine it with the object of ascertaining what light it throws upon ancient Babylonian life and customs, and the conditions under which the people lived.

The code gives a good deal of information with regard to the family life of the Babylonians, and, above all, proves the sanctity with which the marriage-tie was invested.  The claims that were involved by marriage were not lightly undertaken.  Any marriage, to be legally binding, had to be accompanied by a duly executed and attested marriage-contract.  If a man had taken a woman to wife without having carried out this necessary preliminary, the woman was not regarded as his wife in the legal sense.  On the other hand, when once such a marriage-contract had been drawn up, its inviolability was stringently secured.  A case of proved adultery on the part of a man’s wife was punished by the drowning of the guilty parties, though the husband of the woman, if he wished to save his wife, could do so by an appeal to the king.  Similarly, death was the penalty for a man who ravished another man’s betrothed wife while she was still living in her father’s house, but in this case the girl’s innocence and inexperience were taken into account, and no penalty was enforced against her and she was allowed to go free.  Where the adultery of a wife was not proved,