BABYLON AND PERSIA

252 ' MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA.authority of . . . ," and had the employer after¬wards chosen to deny or repudiate the purchase,Iba, son of Silla, would have been compelled to keepand pay for it himself, the law being explicit on thesubject:"If a man has contracted for a field andhouse in the name of another, but has not received aletter of authority concerning it, or has not shown aduplicate of the tablet, the man who wrote the tabletand contract in his name shall lose that house andfield."20. Not that we can boast the recovery of a com¬plete code of Babylonian law.It is even very doubt¬ful whether such a code existed at all.The lawyersand judges looked for guidance to some very ancientdocuments, now known as " tablets of precedents."These tablets, several of which have been found anddeciphered, seem to have formed a continuous series,and are bilingual, the text being in the old Accadianlanguage, accompanied by an Assyrian translation.These texts or sentences are said to be not exactly .laws, but to " give precepts or rules for the conductof man in his various occupations." *Had we theentire collection, we should probably find that these" rules and precepts," the accumulated fruits of per¬haps centuries of experience andobservation, em¬braced the whole range of human life, in its private,social, and public capacities.As it is, wc find theremuch valuable material.One tablet gives instruc¬tion for the agriculturist, " when and how he is to* See the paper of Mr. George Berlin, " Accadian Precepts for theConduct of Man in Private Life," in "Trans, of the Soc. of BibleAreha:ology," vol. VIII,, 1884.