Legal Regulations at Ebla – Part I: Toward a New Understanding of ARET XVI, 1

This study offers a new understanding of ARET XVI, 1 in terms of a coherent collection of legal provisions in casuistic form — the oldest currently known. The analysis of its materiality and content suggests the document be a practice or reference text produced by local scribes. The apparent goal for the student was to get acquainted with legal terminology and phraseology. In support of the new interpretation, the article gathers parallels from later legal materials (Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Hittite laws). Further support is provided by a detailed philological analysis of the difficult terminology implied in ARET XVI, 1, together with a study of its phraseology and overall structure of the document. Its content appears to be arranged in logical units, which take the form of conditional statements. Special attention is given to the textual section on adultery, which serves as a key to understanding the document’s overall framework. The text details the situation in which a husband catches his wife lying with another man. As in legal materials from later period, the legal procedure makes use of the tallion principle: the husband may kill the unfaithful couple on the spot and without penalties, but if he wish to spare his wife he must also spare her lover. The new interpretation not only refines our knowledge on legal practices at Ebla, thus opening new avenues for research on related chancery texts, but also contributes to a deeper understanding of the development of early legal systems, their social impact, and the role they played in the sophisticated scribal milieu of mid-third millennium BCE Syria.