There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
Your disagreement is with the terminology used in your own cite. But the terminology doesn’t matter. If your cite is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, then these cultures held that something wrong had happened — that is, some imbalance had occurred that had to be righted — when one person caused the death of another. Perhaps they considered intentional killing to be no worse than a common accident. But another way to say that is that they considered unintentional killing to be just as bad as intentional killing.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
If the cultures you want to use for your argument left sparser evidence, then that means that you should be less confident about your interpretation of the moral thinking that was behind the written laws that they did leave behind.
In fact, you have a greater burden of proof than your interlocutors. You are saying that a culture that left less evidence was different in a particular way from most of the cultures for which we have better evidence, whereas your interlocutors are saying that the less-evidenced culture was probably about the same in this particular way. That means that your hypothesis is more complicated, and so a priori less likely.
Your disagreement is with the terminology used in your own cite. But the terminology doesn’t matter. If your cite is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, then these cultures held that something wrong had happened — that is, some imbalance had occurred that had to be righted — when one person caused the death of another. Perhaps they considered intentional killing to be no worse than a common accident. But another way to say that is that they considered unintentional killing to be just as bad as intentional killing.
If the cultures you want to use for your argument left sparser evidence, then that means that you should be less confident about your interpretation of the moral thinking that was behind the written laws that they did leave behind.
In fact, you have a greater burden of proof than your interlocutors. You are saying that a culture that left less evidence was different in a particular way from most of the cultures for which we have better evidence, whereas your interlocutors are saying that the less-evidenced culture was probably about the same in this particular way. That means that your hypothesis is more complicated, and so a priori less likely.