* Most of these tablets are preserved in the British Museum.
The principal?works in which they have been published are
Cuneiform Texts in the British Museum (1896, etc.),
Strassmaier's Altbabylonischen Vertrage aus Warka, and
Meissner's Beitrage zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht. A
number of similar tablets of this period, preserved in the
Pennsylvania Museum, will shortly be published by Dr. Ranke.
One of these new sources of information consists of a remarkable series
of royal letters, written by kings of the First Dynasty, which has been
recovered and is now preserved in the British Museum. The letters were
addressed to the governors and high officials of various great cities in
Babylonia, and they contain the king's orders with regard to details of
the administration of the country which had been brought to his notice.
The range of subjects with which they deal is enormous, and there is
scarcely one of them which does not add to our knowledge of the period.*
The other new source of information is the great code of laws, drawn up
by Hammurabi for the guidance of his people and defining the duties and
privileges of all classes of his subjects, the discovery of which at
Susa has been described in a previous chapter. The laws are engraved on
a great stele of diorite in no less than forty-nine columns of writing,
of which forty-four are preserved,* and at the head of the stele is
sculptured a representation of the king receiving them from Shamash, the
Sun-god.
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