Hammurabi Promulgates His Law Code
Hammurabi had 282 laws carved onto a two-metre block of black diorite around 1754 BC, and most of a modern legal vocabulary can be read off it. He ruled Babylon for forty-two years and spent the first three decades of it as one middling king among several, building canals and temples, before destroying Elam, Larsa, Mari and Eshnunna in a short sequence of campaigns and controlling all of Mesopotamia. The stele is not the first law collection — Ur-Nammu's is three centuries older — and it is the most complete. It opens with a long prologue in which the gods call Hammurabi to make justice appear in the land and to stop the strong oppressing the weak, and closes with curses on anyone who effaces it. The laws themselves are casuistic: if a man does this, then that follows. They cover wages, rents, irrigation negligence, medical fees and malpractice, divorce, inheritance, false witness, and the liability of a builder whose house collapses. The penalties depend entirely on the status of both parties. Retaliation in kind applies between men of the free landowning class, which is where an eye for an eye comes from, and an offence against a commoner or a slave is settled in silver. A woman could hold property and initiate divorce, and could be drowned for others. The stele was carried off to Susa as plunder in the twelfth century BC and found there by French archaeologists in 1901. It is in the Louvre, and the text is taught in law faculties.
- Year: 1754 BCE
- Category: Political
