Cuneiform law
Cuneiform law is generally classified separately from later Middle Eastern law, but has been viewed as a predecessor of Biblical and Jewish law. The communities of the Middle East that made use of cuneiform law were generally all in contact with one another, and developed similar cultures. Akkadian, a cuneiform language, was used throughout the entire area, and even as far as Egypt, for diplomatic communications during the Amarna Period.
Cuneiform
The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from the near eastern token system used for accounting. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. It has been suggested that the token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs.