The punishments for most laws involved an equal retribution but being put to death was often more common than not. Not only did they help decide the law, but they even made laws that the gods had to follow such as how they should behave and which gods were allowed to marry each other. The assembly was also responsible for telling the king if any new laws he attempts to pass would be unfair or if the law would be offensive to the gods. They would use the codified law to assign punishments and perform trials in a fair and even way. There was an elected council of elders called the assembly that would be the ones to judge the cases. At the time this system was seen as fair as were the punishments, with the most famous adage of Hammurabi’s legal code being, “If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.” commonly used as the proverb “an eye for an eye”. Laws were codified so that crimes and their respective punishments were well known by everyone. Mesopotamians took a different approach with their legal system. The decrees of the pharaoh were used along with precedents from previous rulings of law and most trials were a case by case basis. A board of officials (Egyptian DADAt) might be set up for particular short-term tasks, by royal commission, and such a task might be the judgement of an important legal case, but it might also be the successful management of a project such as a quarrying expedition.” Law seemed to be more of an additional task for the government than its own dedicated branch. The same groups of individuals might regularly meet to consider a range of administrative and legal cases (Egyptian ‘council’), but no special space or building seems to have been set aside for this. Officials judged cases no ancient Egyptian individuals are known whose only official capacity was to hear legal cases. Law was usually “an aspect of administration, making any official a possible adjudicant: it was not separated off with its own exclusively judicial officials and its own exclusively judicial buildings – no judges and no courts. The main stipulation was that the laws followed the teachings and ideals of the goddess Ma’at but the interpretation and implementation was left up to the pharaoh. Egyptian law was less rigid than law in Mesopotamia, having laws written after each pharaoh came into power. The laws of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt were both performed and established in different ways. Get original essay Egypt and Mesopotamia Compare and Contrast: Cultural Similarities and Drastic Differences
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