The slave ranks were recruited principally by captives taken in war. But there was regular slave trading. A great many slaves were bought of dealers. After a great battle many prisoners were sold publicly. It is interesting to note that the Code contemplates slave dealers often offering for sale in Babylonia slaves whom they had bought abroad. Such might include slaves captured, stolen, or fled from Babylonia, and even Babylonians themselves. If a Babylonian recognized his lost slave offered for sale the law insisted that the dealer should take just what he had paid for the slave abroad. He had to state this price on oath. On the other hand, a Babylonian captive bought abroad and offered for sale in Babylonia was to be set free. So a slave merchant made no profit on any one who had once been in Babylonia before, scarcely an encouragement to rescue Babylonians by buying them in foreign lands. But the slave dealer was sure of his price for both. For the feudal tenant who had to perform military service, and therefore was most likely to be captured abroad, was to be ransomed whenever possible by his own family, if not by the local treasury, the temple; if that was too impoverished, he would be ransomed by the State (§ 32). Of course, a very large part of Hammurabi’s Code, as may be expected, deals with matters which primarily concerned the state of society in Babylonia in his day. Much of this was quite unlike the state of society for which the Laws of Moses were promulgated. Deeply interesting as such sections are for the early history of human institutions, we must set them aside if we are to confine our investigations within reasonable limits. Suffice it now to repeat the opinion that the Code is one of the most important documents ever recovered to elucidate ancient history. For this contribution to knowledge the histories of Babylonia may be consulted, for its contribution to the study of ancient law the works of PROFESSOR KOHLER and PROFESSOR SCHORR, and their bibliographies are most valuable. It is, however, clear that the Code did not aim at legislating for everything that could occur. It says nothing about murder. That was evidently left to be dealt with by well-established custom. Only it interferes to protect the man, who in a quarrel and evidently in danger of his own life should strike a fatal blow. He was allowed to purge himself by oath that he did not mean to kill. Further it passes sentence of death on the wife who procures her husband’s death for love of another man. What the custom was with respect to deliberate premeditated murder we do not yet know. But a late text quotes as an immemorial custom at Babylon that not even a brigand could be put to death there without trial. The Code is a digest of customary law, a set of confirmed and enacted precedents. It is not properly a Code in the sense of the fully systematized _Code civile_ of France or the German _Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch_. LECTURE II