The Hittite Laws survive on cuneiform tablets found at Hattusha. Their approximately 200 provisions cover everything from fatal fights to wandering livestock. The collection gives compensation a prominent place. An injured person could receive care, replacement labor, and payment of a physician’s fee.
That helps explain the claim that the Hittite Laws were more humane than Hammurabi’s. Yet the same collection prescribed execution and mutilation. It also valued injuries differently according to whether the victim was free or enslaved. If you read the clauses together, compensation and severe inequality appear side by side.
What are the Hittite laws?
The collection was first written down during the Old Kingdom, approximately 1650–1500 BCE, according to Harry A. Hoffner. The CHiL project dates the oldest surviving copies to the sixteenth century BCE. These dates concern different things: the collection’s initial recording and the physical copies that remain.
Old, Middle, and Late Hittite copies indicate that scribes reproduced the laws for approximately 500 years. The surviving tablets do not explicitly identify the ruler who issued the collection or authorized later changes. Attaching the entire text to one named lawgiver would therefore misrepresent the surviving evidence.
For travelers to Turkey, the geographical connection is direct. Hattusha, where the tablets were found, lies in today’s Boğazkale district of Çorum. The mostly fragmentary law tablets were recovered during the Boğazköy excavations of 1906–1907. This places the collection within the archaeological record of the Hittite capital.
Hittite law code summary: was it more humane than Hammurabi’s?
Hittite penalties are often described as milder than those of Hammurabi and the Middle Assyrian laws. Compensation provides a basis for that assessment. Law 7, for example, required 20 shekels of silver for blinding a free person’s eye or breaking a tooth. Law 98 required a free person who burned down a house to rebuild it.
Changes recorded within the collection also support a qualified argument for greater leniency. The words karū, meaning “formerly,” and kinun=a, meaning “but now,” distinguish earlier rules from revised ones. Some silver penalties were reduced. Some death penalties were replaced by compensation.
The limits are equally concrete. Under law 99, an enslaved arsonist could have their nose and ears cut off when their master paid compensation. Law 170 prescribed death for an enslaved person in a particular offense involving killing a snake. These provisions prevent “more humane” from becoming a description of every Hittite punishment.
Even the familiar claim that Hittite law lacked retaliation is disputed. Birgit Christiansen’s 2015 study argues that many provisions rested on the principle of retaliation. You should therefore treat the comparison with Hammurabi as a qualified assessment of penalties, rather than a settled verdict on the whole collection.
Hittite laws list: which provisions matter most?
The traditional numbering divides the collection into two sequences. Laws 1–100 are known by the opening words “If a person.” Laws 101–200 are known as “If a vine.” Individual provisions generally state a situation beginning with “if,” then give its penalty or compensation.
These examples show the collection’s range:
- Law 1: Someone who killed a man or woman in a fight had to deliver the body and provide four people in compensation.
- Law 2: Killing an enslaved man or woman in a fight required compensation of two people.
- Law 7: Blinding a free person’s eye or breaking a tooth required 20 shekels of silver.
- Law 8: The corresponding injury to an enslaved person required 10 shekels.
- Law 10: The person responsible for an injury had to cover care, replacement labor during recovery, and the physician’s fee.
- Law 98: A free person who set fire to a house had to rebuild it.
Laws 1 and 2 make the status distinction especially stark. Both concern a death during a fight. Yet the compensation changes from four people to two when the victim is enslaved. Laws 7 and 8 repeat that unequal treatment in silver payments for the same kinds of injury.
Details you won’t find in guidebooks
Law 10 offers an everyday-life connection: an injury can bring medical bills and stop someone working. The clause required the person who caused the injury to maintain the victim, supply a worker until recovery, and pay the physician. If you have ever considered the costs surrounding an accident, these separate obligations are easy to recognize.
Law 9 records a change in who received an injury payment. Previously, three shekels from a six-shekel payment for a head injury went to the palace. The clause states that the king abolished the palace’s share. Here, revision concerned the destination of the payment as well as the injury itself.
Livestock provisions drew careful distinctions around possession. Under law 66, an animal that wandered into another enclosure could be recovered. The enclosure’s owner could not be seized as a thief merely because the animal had entered. Under law 86, however, someone who killed a pig that entered their field committed theft if they failed to give the animal to its owner.
Law 170 gives a harsher example of unequal punishment. It concerns killing a snake while speaking another person’s name. A free offender owed one mina of silver. An enslaved offender faced death. The same specified act thus led to radically different consequences according to legal status.
What does Hittite law 189 say?
Law 189 defines a man’s sexual relations with his mother, daughter, or son as a prohibited union. It belongs among the collection’s provisions governing sexual relations. Its content is distinct from the widow-marriage arrangement described in law 193.
Reading law 189 alongside provisions on marriage, injury, land, and wages shows the breadth of the collection. The approximately 200 clauses bring household relationships and property disputes into the same compilation as killing and bodily harm.
What does Hittite law 193 say?
Law 193 describes an arrangement involving a deceased man’s widow. Marriage proceeds first to the dead man’s brother and then to his father. The provision presents this arrangement as one that was not punishable.
The distinction between laws 189 and 193 matters. Law 189 identifies specified sexual relations as prohibited. Law 193 describes a widow’s marriage within her deceased husband’s family as unpunished. Their neighboring numbers do not mean that they establish the same rule about family relationships.
Hittite laws translation: how should you read the clauses?
Start with the clause number, then follow its condition and consequence. In law 7, for instance, the condition concerns an eye or tooth injury to a free person. The consequence is a specified silver payment.
Pay particular attention to legal status and revision language. Laws 7 and 8 assign different payments to corresponding injuries. The expressions “formerly” and “but now” distinguish earlier penalties from later ones. These details affect the rule itself, rather than merely adding background to it.
The University of Texas interprets the collection as an accumulation of civil and criminal rules practiced in society. This reading differs from treating it as a document devised entirely by one central authority. Its long copying history and recorded revisions make that interpretive distinction worth keeping in view.
Hittite law book: why read Hoffner’s Hittite laws?
Harry A. Hoffner’s The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition was published by Brill in 1997. New York University’s Ancient World Digital Library provides a downloadable PDF. If you want a book devoted to the collection, this is a concrete starting point.
Hoffner also identifies a New Hittite revision called the “Late Parallel Version,” containing 41 sections. That revision helps explain why the traditional count of approximately 200 laws does not capture every textual arrangement. The collection survives through copies and revisions, rather than one unchanging tablet.
Timeline
- Approximately 1650–1500 BCE: The laws were first written down during the Old Kingdom, according to Hoffner’s dating.
- Sixteenth century BCE: The oldest surviving copies were written, according to CHiL.
- 1906–1907: Excavations at Boğazköy recovered the law tablets.
- 1997: Hoffner’s The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition was published.
FAQ
What are the Hittite Laws?
They are a collection of approximately 200 legal provisions preserved on cuneiform tablets found at Hattusha. Their subjects include killing, injury, marriage, land, theft, arson, wages, and sexual relations.
Were the Hittite Laws more humane than Hammurabi’s?
Their emphasis on compensation and recorded reductions in some penalties supports a qualified comparison. However, the collection also includes execution, mutilation, and different penalties according to legal status.
What does Hittite law 193 say?
It describes marriage between a widow and her deceased husband’s brother, followed by his father, as an arrangement that was not punishable.
Where can you read a Hittite laws translation?
English translations are available through the University of Texas at Austin and Fordham University. Harry A. Hoffner’s The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition is available digitally through New York University.
Sources
- CHiL — The Corpus of Hittite Laws hatti.adwudlit.uni-mainz.de
- Harry A. Hoffner — Hittite Laws, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor e-edu.nbu.bg
- University of Texas at Austin — The Law Code (Old Hittite) lrc.la.utexas.edu
- UNESCO — Hattusha: the Hittite Capital whc.unesco.org
- LMU Munich — Sanction and its principles in Hittite law en.ag.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de
- New York University, Ancient World Digital Library — The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition sites.dlib.nyu.edu
Image: Hittite Cuneiform Tablet- Legal Deposition(?).jpg — Mx. Granger, CC0