If it could be shown that just those features which are common to the Hammurabi Code and the Israelite, and therefore presumably existed in the common Semitic origin, are unlike anything in the Sumerian or pre-Semitic laws of Babylonia, then the fact of a common Semitic origin might have to be admitted without our being able to fix upon a locality for it. In Babylonia a predominance of Semites, at least in the north, may be dated, perhaps a thousand years before Hammurabi, under Sargon of Akkad. But while we know of Sumerian Family Laws and have references to legal reforms under the Sumerian Kings of Babylonia even in pre-Sargonic times, we have not yet sufficient material from those early days to know exactly how far Hammurabi’s Code was really an advance upon older Sumerian law. Slowly but surely we are learning that precisely the same legal forms were in use, long before Hammurabi, among the Sumerians of the south. The legal documents of Hammurabi’s age are full of the old Sumerian words and phrases, used just as dog-Latin or Norman-French was in our deeds of early English times. We could not claim a common use of Teutonic translations of Roman law terms in England and Germany, if such existed, as proof of a common Teutonic origin for the laws. But the Hammurabi Code is full of Semitic translations of Sumerian terms. This would be quite fatal to the theory of common Semitic origin but for the fact that the Sumerians had been conquered so long before by Sargon, and we cannot yet clearly sift out what may have been due to his Semitic followers from what may have been imposed on them by the subject Sumerians. The conquest of Babylonia by Elam may have affected its laws more than we think. The barbarous Elamite punishments survived in Babylonia, in Mesopotamia, even in Israel, two thousand years or more. But one can hardly argue much from that. The early history of Babylonian law is still very obscure, and we can only state probabilities of more or less cogency. The Semitic origin seems afflicted by lack of cogency. One must respect it for the attachment which certain estimable divines show to it. One rather wonders whether Noah was a Semite as well as his eldest son, and whether these laws really go back as early as Shem. Elam had claims to be a Semite, and an early Semitic kingdom in Elam seems to have been long predominant there. Was Elam the real common Semitic home both of Amorites and Israelites? There was a district not far from the border of Elam over which Kudur-Mabuk, the father of Rîm-Sin, once ruled, and which was known as the land of the Amorites. Thence the First Dynasty of Babylon may have come. Whether the ancestors of Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees were once Amorites or earlier Elamites we cannot yet decide. But with all these speculations scientific folk show small patience: for they have another way of solving the problem.