Yet they adopted both the Mesopotamians’ legal techniques and much of their laws’ substance.38 Of course, some problems arise almost everywhere that people live together. Every society must decide how to respond to an accidental killing, how to deal with conflicting evidence about the loss of property, and what penalties to apply for rape, and it should not be a surprise if different people came up with similar solutions. But some of the details are too particular to be the result of coincidence.
