What is the earliest form of law that helped shaped criminal law now?

Answer 1

cuneiform, a system of writing invented by the ancient Sumerians and used in the Middle East in the last three millennium BC. It includes the laws of the majority of the inhabitants of the ancient Middle East-especially the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, Hurrians, Kassites, and Hittites-who, despite many ethnic differences, were in contact with each other and developed similar civilizations.

That is the written language, I think you're looking for the code of Hammurabi.

Answer 2

The probable origin of government is a

question of fact, to be settled, not by conjecture, but by history. Some

traces we can still discern of the history of primitive societies. As

fragments of primitive animals have been kept for us sealed up in the earth's

rocks, so fragments of primitive institutions have been preserved, embedded in

the rocks of surviving law or custom, mixed up with the rubbish of accumulated

tradition, crystallized in the organization of still savage tribes, or kept

curiously in the museum of fact and rumor swept together by some ancient

historian. Limited and perplexing as such means of reconstructing history may

be, they repay patient comparison and analysis as richly as do the materials

of the archaeologist and the philologian. The facts as to the origin and early

history of government are at least as available as the facts concerning the

growth and kinship of languages or the genesis and development of the arts and

sciences. Such light as we can get from the knowledge of the infancy of

society thus meagrely afforded us is, at any rate, better than that derived

from a priori speculations founded upon our acquaintance with our modern

selves, or from any fancies, how learnedly soever constructed, that we might

weave as to the way in which history might plausibly be read backwards.

References:

The Earliest Forms of Government by Woodrow Wilson