Lipit-Ishtar

a king of the first dynasty of the state of Isin (in Mesopotamia), who ruled from about 1934 B.C. to 1924 B.C. In the second year of his reign, he “established justice in Sumer and Akkad” (which probably meant that he had declared certain land-promotion deals and debts to be invalid); he later canceled all arrears in taxes. A law code was drawn up during his reign (it has survived in the form of fragments of various hand-written copies). From the poorly preserved prologue to Lipit-Ishtar’s laws, it is apparent that he reduced the obligations of the country’s population (although the details of that reduction have not yet been traced). Lipit-Ishtar’s laws evidently influenced the law code of Hammurabi (about 1760 B.C.).