Cuneiform law
Cuneiform law refers to any of the legal codes written in cuneiform script, that were developed and used throughout the ancient Middle East among the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, Hurrians, Kassites, and Hittites. The Code of Hammurabi is the most well-known of the cuneiform laws, but there were a number of precursor laws.
Cuneiform
The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from the 23rd century BC (short chronology), and by the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), it had evolved into Old Assyrian cuneiform, with many modifications to Sumerian orthography. The Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by the Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and the "Winkelhaken" impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are
Except for the "Winkelhaken" which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition.