The ancient Iraqi laws are among the oldest recorded laws in the world so far, as the date of the oldest of these laws, which is the law of Ur - the growth of the founder of the third dynasty of Ur, goes back to the end of the third millennium BC, while other laws date back to the early second millennium BC, that is, to The first section of the Old Babylonian Testament. In addition to the codified laws, hundreds or even thousands of cuneiform texts related to the legal systems that prevailed in ancient Iraq from the middle of the third millennium BC onwards were found, including the famous Ur and Kagina reforms, which we will elaborate on later.
Whereas the ancient Iraqis were the first to invent writing or use it as a means of writing, and that was in the second half of the fourth millennium BC, so the legal cuneiform texts discovered in Iraqi sites were of great importance in studying the emergence and development of legal systems in general.
Any study of the ancient Iraqi texts indicates the great contribution and the remarkable achievement of the ancient Iraqis, the Sumerians among them, and the ancient Arab peoples in the human civilization field and their merit in placing the first building blocks in the legal organization of the first societies.
Punishment as an idea and as an aspect of the law is undoubtedly a feature of developed societies that have crossed the stage of primacy and brutality. It is, as defined by positive laws, the penalty that is inflicted on the perpetrator of the crime in the interest of the social organization, meaning that the punishment does not exist in the first place unless there is a social organization that has its laws and provisions that protect its public interest. Primitive.