Cuneiform 103 · Chapter 11

An eye for an eye

Everyone has heard this law. Almost no one has read it. It sits two hundred laws deep in the stele, four lines long, and every word of it is about to be yours.

Batch twelve — and a veteran

Law 196, from the stone

Item by item — the famous line runs on everything you own:

• īn — “the eye of”: the eye-WORD, īnum, in chapter 03’s construct statethe stripped-down form a noun takes to bind with the noun after it — bēl šamê, "lord-of-heaven" — losing its ending to gain an "of" — and spelled i-in, sound by sound, while the eye-SIGN IGI sits this law out. The scribe had a picture of an eye and chose the sounds instead.
• mār — “son of”: the sumerograma Sumerian word-sign kept inside Akkadian text as learned shorthand — written LUGAL, read aloud as Akkadian šarrum, "king" DUMU, construct again — two constructs stacked: the eye of the son of a man.
• uḫtappid — “has blinded”: the blinding-verb in the D stem with chapter 09’s -t- infix — the deed done, decisive, on the record.
• uḫappadū — “THEY shall blind”: the same D verb, durativethe Akkadian verb shape for what happens or shall happen — inaddin, "he shall pay": the laws pronounce every sentence in it, with chapter 08’s plural -ū — the court acts, not a person. The law answers a singular crime with a plural verdict.

Reassembled: “If a man has blinded the eye of a man’s son — his eye they shall blind.” Symmetry as justice, one verb pointing both ways.

The law beside it

The very next ruling swaps the eye for a bone. But its middle word is written with a three-sign Sumerian compound whose signs a later batch will teach — and a reading shows nothing this course has not taught. So take law 197 the way the court heard it, as sound alone:

šumma eṣemti awīlim ištebir — eṣemtašu išebbirū. “If he has broken the bone of a man — his bone they shall break.”¹

Same skeleton as law 196 in every sense: perfectthe Akkadian verb shape for what HAS happened — a -ta- slipped in after the first root consonant: iptaras "he has decided", uḫtappid "he has blinded"; the laws use it for the newest deed in a chain for the deed, plural durativethe Akkadian verb shape for what happens or shall happen — inaddin, "he shall pay": the laws pronounce every sentence in it for the verdict, the -t- and the -ū doing exactly what they did one law up. Read law 196 until it is easy, and law 197 reads itself before you have seen its signs — which is the deepest fact about the Codex: it is one grammar, applied two hundred and eighty-two times. When the bone-word’s own signs arrive, these four lines will owe you nothing new.

Drill before you go on

1. Write 𒌔UH₂ · [uh] · spittle, phlegm in the lists, 𒉺PA · [pa] · branch; the scepter in Sumerian, 𒀊AB · [ab/ap] · a window in the lists from memory; say uh, pa, ab.
2. uḫtappid vs uḫappadū — name every difference: stem, tense, number, and who is acting.
3. Why is the eye spelled i-in and not written 𒅆IGI · [ši/lim] · šīmātum's opener, awīlim's close? What does that tell you about how scribes chose?
4. Two constructs stand in a row in law 196. Unstack them.

Next: the mail of Babylon — a real letter, formula and all, and the sweetest conditional sentence in the corpus.