Sumerian legal proceedings were held before an assembly of elders. The assembly was directed by one of them who was generally appointed as "judge", although we have no news that it was an office as such. It is believed that a judge in Sumeria had to be an old man who had shown great knowledge of the laws of the city. These legal assemblies were reminiscent of archaic times, when early Sumerian cities were governed by these very assemblies, before someone very clever, and possibly with the support of a few soldiers, discovered the meaning of the word "big shot » and his relationship with «ruler «.
Among the thousands of tablets found in excavations in Mesopotamia, complete court records have rarely turned up. On three tablets discovered in the city of Larsa , it was possible to obtain the judicial resolution, the statements of the defender and even the reflections of the judges. A great example of how the Sumerian legal system worked, and more interesting when, in addition, the legal process was against a woman. In the case at hand, Ninkanda , that was the name of this tavern, she was accused of complicity in the murder of her husband. And here begins the bizarre story. Apparently, two men had killed her husband with a couple of blows to the head at the door of her home. According to the records, both murderers had been tried, convicted and executed in a public square before the bed of their victim . This of placing a daily object of the deceased before the murderer who was going to be executed was a Sumerian custom that, perhaps, indicated that the black heads thought that in this way the dead person was present and attended the execution from the World on the Other Side .
The problem is that the sharp tongues, the comadres, the unemployed neighbors... and people of that fur, murmured that the good Ninkanda she had had something to do with the death of her better half. Alexandre Dumas already said it:“Cherchez la femme ”.
Before the assembly of elders, the defender (we have no idea what a defender was in Sumeria or how he acted) claimed that Ninkanda he did not know these men at all, and he produced two witnesses who corroborated it. The most dangerous point in her accusation against her was that her neighbors had not seen her saddened by the death of her husband. The defense attorney argued that she was a very circumspect woman and also presented witnesses to her character. Finally, like a kind of Cicero of the two rivers, he took advantage of the fact that she had nothing to gain from the death of her husband, since her tavern belonged to Ninkanda and she was the "rich" of the couple. This seems very modern to us, and reminds us of the current legal principle of «cui bono » (who benefits?) taken from Roman Law. Finally, the judge, representing the assembly, decided to declare her innocent. her Thanks to this, she escaped being taken to a public square and having her pubes shaved while a town crier read the sentence, and then being impaled. And it is that in Sumer, of course, murdering the husband was paid with life, while taking away the wife was arranged with a high fine... but a fine after all.
However, reviewing the minutes, the matter is not entirely clear. Because nowhere does it say why he was murdered. The testimonies of the witnesses today seem a bit childish to us, since they do not prove anything of what they affirm about Ninkanda she didn't know the killers. Her testimony is accepted after a simple sacred oath. It is also not clear why she felt so little pain for the death of her husband, and we have the aggravating circumstance that in the Sumerian cities refusing to have sex with the husband could be an excuse for the murder of her wife. The minutes, despite being complete, fall short and arouse our morbid curiosity 3,700 years later. Was the husband an abuser? Cherchez la femme? Ignored tasty bedroom secrets? Who knows…! There is no doubt that a juicy novel would come out of this.
Contributed by Joshua BedwyR author of In a Dark Blue World