A. T. CLAY in the _Orientalistische Litteraturzeitung_, xvii, January, 1914 (Leipzig, Hinrichs), writing on _A Sumerian Prototype of the Hammurabi Code_, has made it clear that some of the laws existed in a Sumerian dress. Hammurabi, as we have already contended, modified the previously existing Sumerian laws, and taking some over bodily, changed others to suit the peculiar prejudices of his subjects and the circumstances of his time. We may soon be able to judge whether CLAY’S _Sumerian Code_, as we may call it, was really early, or only the dress in which Hammurabi’s law appeared in his Sumerian provinces. We may pass on to notice briefly the chief sources from which it is possible to deduce much of the local customary law throughout the history of Babylonia. It may formally be divided into Temple accounts and contracts, but a detailed classification would demand much more space than we can here afford. THE TEMPLE ACCOUNTS. At all times the great temples of Assyria and Babylonia kept extensive accounts of even daily revenue and expenditure. These accounts were most carefully preserved, being written with special care on well selected clay, and have reached us as a rule in exceptionally fine condition. They give us an immense mass of information, largely consisting of dry and disconnected items, but helping to build up knowledge. The French explorations made by DE SARZEC at Telloh resulted in the discovery of an enormous number of documents, mostly accounts kept of the daily expenses and revenues of the vast temples there, from the earliest times down to the Dynasty of Ur. One huge find of some 30,000 tablets of the latter period were stolen by Arabs, and have been sold in large quantities to European and American Museums, or to private collectors. Few of them are legal documents, or concerned with other than Temple business, but their contents illustrate the state of society in the times before the First Dynasty of Babylon. They are most important for determining the extent to which the Code of Hammurabi was dependent on, or influenced by, the Sumerian Law of earlier days. Of those which reached Constantinople, the products of the season of 1894 consisted entirely of tablets of the Dynasty of Ur, and were classified by V. SCHEIL. The tablets found in 1895 were catalogued by THUREAU-DANGIN, and are mostly of the Dynasty of Akkad. The finds of 1900 are all of the Dynasty of Ur. These are all now catalogued and largely published in the _Inventaire des Tablettes de Tello conservées au Musée Ottoman_ (Paris, E. Leroux, 1910), by FR. THUREAU-DANGIN and H. DE GENOUILLAC.