Reviewed by: The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions by Pamela Bartash Ben Dewar (bio) The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions Pamela Bartash Oxford University Press, 2020. x + 320 pp. $99 hardcover. The monograph under discussion is an "histoire totale" (3) of the Laws of Hammurabi and the stele bearing it, investigating the ideological messages present in the text and image, the scribal culture that influenced the text's composition, and the reception of the Laws in later periods. Bartash's core argument is that Mesopotamian law collections were written by taking a series of stock legal situations and improvising a series of statutes based on them that expressed the scribe's own notions of what was fair and just. The Laws merged this tradition with that of royal inscriptions to create an innovative new expression of royal power. In chapter one, Bartash argues that the image on the stele alters the standard investiture scene in several ways to present Hammurabi as closer in status to the god Shamash. Furthermore, pairing this image with an unusually long text in an archaiz generalization ing, top-to-bottom script creates an original and eye-catching monument. Chapter two focuses on three textual traditions relating to justice that were pre-existent when the Laws was written: acts of equity described in royal hymns and inscriptions, social reform edicts, and law collections. Bartash analyses the content and rhetoric of these three types of text, arguing that they all demonstrate the role of justice in royal legitimation, but do so in different ways. Chapters three and four explore how the Laws' author combined the traditions discussed in chapter two into a new expression of royal justice. Chapter three analyses the Laws as a royal inscription, analysing how the author engaged with the discourse practices of Mesopotamian commemorative inscriptions. Chapter four compares the Laws with other law collections to argue that it is more complexly structured than its earlier counterparts. Bartash argues that, like the authors of earlier law codes, the Laws' scribe [End Page 209] improvised a series of example statutes based on his knowledge of legal texts and terminology internalised during scribal education. However, the Laws' scribe innovatively structured their improvised statutes, demonstrating a more complex conceptualisation and systematisation of law and implying a number of legal principles. The Laws therefore marks an important step, Bartash argues, towards the generalization and abstraction of law. Bartash demonstrates the conceptualization and systematization present in the Laws in chapter five, which uses the adoption statutes from the Laws as a case study for the concepts discussed in chapter four. Chapter four ends with an excursus on scribes and their education. The placement of this section is slightly confusing. The excursus outlines scribes' internalisation of the discourse practices and streams of tradition engaged in chapter four. One would therefore expect it to be placed earlier in the book. This is, however, a minor criticism, and the reader does not feel lost for not having read the excursus before chapter four. Chapter six tackles the important question of the legal authority of the Laws. Previous scholarship has often debated whether the Laws represents the law as it was practiced in Mesopotamia by identifying legal cases in royal letters or archival records that mirror circumstances described in the Laws. Bartash argues that this methodology applies modern conceptions of legal precedent to a culture whose legal system did not operate on precedent, and emphasizes the consistency of law while ignoring the need for discretion in the adjudication of individual legal cases. Bartash instead focuses on the flexibility of Mesopotamian law; the Laws is not a written record of the code actually enforced, but one scribe's expression of their own ideas—formed through intensive engagement with pre-existing legal literature—on what is fair and just. This novel approach to the Laws resolves many of the problems surrounding the nature of the Laws, and greatly improves our understanding of Mesopotamian law. Chapter seven explores the reception of the Laws in later periods. First, Bartash considers instances of scribal improvization in later law collections. She argues that the exportation of the...