These late copies show that the inscription was edited in a series of tablets or ‘Books’ called _Ninu Anum tsirum_, from the first words of the text, just as Genesis was called Bereshith from its first word or other books of the Old Testament were named in the same way. Another series was called _Dinâni sha Hammurabi_, from the first words of the Epilogue or closing portion of the text. From these editions we may conclude that the Code was known and studied both in Assyria and Babylonia at least as late as the seventh century B.C. Whether any monumental stela with this inscription survived so long after the Susa examples had been carried off is not yet certain. But these editions are of extreme value as indications that a knowledge of the provisions of the Code existed so long and was preserved so accurately. We may note that there is a very great advantage for students of this ancient body of law in the fact that beside a long tradition accurately preserved we have a practically complete autograph of the Code as originally promulgated. There can be no suspicion of overwriting, interpolation or gloss, no tendency-redaction, no revision in the interests of any party, priestly or political. We have no need to seek for any conjectural restoration, except for a few erased clauses or defaced characters. We have no call to split up the text[10] into strata as embodying older laws, though we know such earlier codes had existed perhaps a thousand years before. A comparison with such fragments of earlier law as we possess shows indeed much change if not always progress in that period, and marks on the whole a great advance in civilization. It is a task still reserved for the students of Babylonian law to make careful researches into the growth of social institutions and the development of legal conceptions which led up to this Code. It will prove a most instructive study if pursued apart from the presumptions deduced from other and unrelated areas which now form a body of dogmatic prejudice from which many scholars seem unable to emancipate their thought. We must, however, start our investigations at a point where the Code has already arrived, when it must be treated as the principal landmark in the long history of law in Babylonia. Whatever may be our view as to what should have been the evolution of law before that date we must be careful to remember what that evolution produced.