Daily History Challenge · No. 117 · Friday 23 October 2026 · When?
Puzzle No. 117: When?
The event was Reforms of Urukagina of Lagash, in c. 2350 BCE.
The answer
Around 2350 BCE, Urukagina (also read Uruinimgina), the last ruler of the First Dynasty of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, promulgated a body of administrative and social reforms that are among the earliest recorded measures of legal and social justice in human history. Inscribed on clay cones and tablets recovered from ancient Lagash, the texts contrast the abuses of his predecessor Lugalanda's regime with his own corrective measures, condemning officials who seized the property of widows, orphans, and the poor. The reforms reduced or abolished extortionate fees and taxes, capped charges for burials and other services, curbed the power of temple overseers and bureaucrats, restored misappropriated temple lands, and freed citizens held in debt bondage through acts of amnesty. The inscriptions contain one of the first known uses of a word for 'freedom' (Sumerian ama-gi), and the reforms are often cited as a precursor to later Mesopotamian law collections such as the codes of Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi. Though scholars debate whether the reforms constituted a unified law code or a reform edict, they remain a landmark in the documented history of governance and social policy.