on of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees to this very period, and
clearly means to represent their tribe father as triumphing over this
very same Hammurabi (Amraphel, Gen. xiv. 1), we can hardly doubt that
these very laws were part of that tradition. At any rate, they must have
served to mould and fix the ideas of right throughout that great empire,
and so form the state of society in Canaan when, five hundred years
later, the Hebrews began to dominate that region.

Such was the effect produced on the minds of succeeding generations by
this superb codification of the judicial decisions of past ages, which
had come to be regarded as 'the right,' that two thousand years and more
later it was made a text-book for study in the schools of Babylonia,
being divided for that purpose into some twelve chapters, and entitled,
after the Semitic custom, _Ninu ilu sirum_, from its opening words. In
Assyria also, in the seventh century B.C., it was studied in a different
edition, apparently under the name of 'The Judgments of Righteousness
which Hammurabi, the great king, set up.' These facts point to it as
certain to affect Jewish views before and after the Exile, in a way that
we may expect to find as fundamental as the Babylonian influence in
cosmology or religion.

For many years fragments have been known, have been studied, and from
internal evidence ascribed to the period of the first dynasty of Babylon,
even called by the name Code Hammurabi. It is just cause for pride that
Assyriology, so young a science as only this year to have celebrated the
centenary of its birth, is able to emulate astronomy and predict the
discovery of such bright stars as this. But while we certainly should
have directed our telescopes to Babylonia for the rising of this light
from the East, it was really in Elam, at Susa, the old Persepolis, that
the find was made. The Elamites were the great rivals of Babylonia for
centuries, and it seems likely that some Elamite conqueror carried off
the stone from a temple at Sippara, in Babylonia.

However that may be, we owe it to the French Government, who have been
carrying on explorations at Susa for years under the superintendence of
M. J. de Morgan, that a monument, only disinterred in January, has been
copied, transcribed, translated, and published, in a superb quarto
volume, by October. The ancient text is reproduced by photogravure in a
way that enables a student to verify word by word what the able e