Tabliczka opisująca proces za morderstwo, Nippur 1850 rok przed naszą erą.

"We conclude this brief summary of some of the more significant tablet-finds of the new Joint Expedition with a document which is legal rather than literary in character; it reports the case of a rather unusual murder-trial which took place some time about 1850 B. C. (see Plate X). The trial must have been celebrated throughout the legal circles of ancient Sumer, and was probably used as a sample case decision or precedent not unlike the more important court decisions of our own clay and age. In any case, another copy of this very same document had been found at Nippur by the first expedition some fifty years ago. The fragment was so badly broken, however, that little could be clone with its contents until the new and much more complete piece was uncovered in the course of this season’s excavations by the Joint Expedition; the two pieces complement each other in a way which makes a practically complete restoration of the text possible. What is unusually interesting about this hoary murder-trial is that it involves the guilt of an “accessory after the fact”; moreover the verdict was quite in line with the legal practice of our own courts. The text of the tablet was identified and transliterated by Thorkild Jacobsen while he was in the field; he later prepared an excellent translation and forwarded it to the present writer who made several minor changes and suggestions. In brief, our text records the story of the murder-trial as follows:

Three men, Nanna-sig, Ku-Enlil, and Enlil-ennam by name, killed a man named Lu-Inanna, and then informed his wife Nin-dada that her husband had been murdered. The wife, strangely enough, kept their secret and made no complaint to the authorities. The case was then brought before Ur-Ninurta who ruled over Sumer in his capital Isin (about 1850 B.C.), and the king, in accordance with his royal prerogative, turned it over to the Nippur assembly, which acted as a court of justice, for the trial. In the Nippur assembly nine men stood up to prosecute the four accused; they argued that not only the three actual murderers, but the woman as well, though only an accessory after the fact, should be executed “before Lu-Inanna’s chair.” Two men then arose in the assembly to defend the woman; they pleaded that the wife took no part in the murder of the husband and therefore should go unpunished. The members of the assembly seemed to agree with the defense-unfortunately the meaning of the relevant lines is rather uncertain. In any case, only the three murderers were turned over by the Nippur assembly, acting as a court of justice, to be executed; the wife was set free."

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