Hammurabi

Hammurabi was the sixth king of the Amorite First Dynasty of Babylon, ruling from around 1792 to around 1750 BC according to the middle chronology. He is the best-known ruler of that dynasty and is remembered for his surviving set of laws, once considered the oldest promulgation of laws in human history. His reign also saw the transformation of Babylon from a city of little importance into the political and later religious capital of Mesopotamia.

Hammurabi inherited a small kingdom in central Mesopotamia and intensified its slow amassing of territory, so that in some thirty short years he gained control over the territory of Rim-Sin in the south and dismantled centers of power to the west, north and east. His conquest of southern Babylonia transformed a small city-state into a large territorial state and shifted the balance of power in Mesopotamia from the south to the north.

As part of his expansionist policy, Hammurabi destroyed the palace of King Zimri-Lim at Mari on the Euphrates River in Syria; the palace was decorated with wall paintings and stone statuary, and its archive of cuneiform tablets illuminates contemporary political events.

Hammurabi failed to set up an effective bureaucracy, and his son lost much of the territory he had conquered. The empire declined under his successors and was brought to an end in a raid by the Hittites from Anatolia circa 1595 B.C.

Babylon rose to prominence in the eighteenth century BCE when, through political alliances and military campaigns, Hammurabi was able to unite a large state under his rule. The city that gave its name to that state had previously held little importance; its transformation into a capital was the work of the king's campaigns and the alliances that accompanied them.

Although Shamash appears at the top of the monument, the prologue of the text attests to the new importance of the god Marduk, who was tied to Babylon as its chief deity for the rest of the city's history.

The Code of Hammurabi is a collection of 282 rules that established standards for commercial interactions and set fines and punishments to meet the requirements of justice. Hammurabi allowed justice to prevail in the land by collecting together 282 laws dealing with commercial, family and property matters, preserved on a stele showing him receiving the rod and ring from the sun god Shamash. The text engraved on the stela is not a legal code in the modern sense of the term but a sweeping collection of jurisprudence, or case law, and scholars believe the laws on the stele were not so much written by the king as listed from judgments that had already been meted out.

The code contemplates the whole population as falling into three classes: the amelu, the muskinu and the ardu. The ardu was a slave, his master's chattel, and formed a very numerous class, though he could acquire property and even hold other slaves. Despite a few primitive survivals such as trial by ordeal and the lex talionis the code was advanced far beyond tribal custom and recognized no blood feud, private retribution, or marriage by capture.

Hammurabi's Code exemplifies the law of retributive justice known as Lex Talionis, defined by the concept of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Law 196 declares that if a man puts out the eye of another man his own eye shall be put out, the basis for what is known today as lex talionis, or the law of retaliation; law 197 provides that if he break another man's bone, his bone shall be broken. Yet this law is far from a call for vengeance and stipulates that a punishment must be proportional to the damages suffered.

The judges are strictly supervised and appeal is allowed, the whole land is covered with feudal holdings, and there is a regular postal system.

The provisions of Hammurabi's code address the physician's work in precise terms: a fee of ten shekels in money is fixed for the practitioner who makes a large incision with an operating knife and cures it, or who opens a tumor over the eye and saves the eye. Where a man wishes to separate from a wife who has borne him no children, the code obliges him to give her the amount of her purchase money together with the dowry she brought from her father's house.

The code opens with a statement of divine commission: in the prologue Hammurabi says that the gods Anu and Bel called him to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land so that the strong should not harm the weak. The epilogue answers the prologue by turning the monument toward those it was meant to protect, inviting the oppressed person who has a case at law to come and stand before his image and read the inscription, which will explain his case.

The closing text also looks beyond the present reign, invoking Shamash to lengthen the reign of a succeeding ruler who considers the words of the inscription and does not annul the law or change the monument.

The monument is a basalt stele standing over 2.25 metres tall, carved from a single four-ton slab of black volcanic stone. At its top sits a two-and-a-half-foot relief of Hammurabi receiving the law from the seated Shamash, while the remainder of the stone is covered with columns of chiseled cuneiform script.

Below the relief, about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text fill the stele, one fifth of them holding a prologue and epilogue in poetic style and the remaining four fifths the laws themselves. Near the bottom, seven columns of the laws, each with more than eighty lines, were polished and erased in antiquity. The stele was found in three large fragments and reconstructed.

The stele of Hammurabi did not remain in Babylonia. Around 1150 BCE Shutruk Nakhunte, King of Elam, sacked the city of Sippar near Babylon and is thought to have taken the Code of Hammurabi along with the statue of the god Marduk back to Elam as spoils of war. It was at Susa that the monument was eventually uncovered, broken into three pieces, during an archaeological expedition led by Jacques de Morgan in 1901. The stele was shipped to the Louvre in Paris, and within a year it had been translated and widely publicized as the earliest known example of a written legal code.

In the Louvre's collections the stele carries the principal inventory number Sb 8, with AS 6064 and PEZARD ET POTTIER 8 as further numbers. Its arrival in Paris did not close the story of early law: three earlier law collections were rediscovered afterwards, among them the Code of Lipit-Ishtar in 1947 and the Code of Ur-Nammu in 1952, both shorter than Hammurabi's.

The Code was studied and recopied for fifteen hundred years or more, and much of it remained in force through the Persian, Greek and Parthian conquests, surviving to influence Syro-Roman and later Mahommedan law in Mesopotamia. Its influence is notable in later law codes such as the Middle Assyrian Laws, the Neo-Babylonian Laws and the Mosaic Law of the Bible, which follow its model of an objective, universal directive on how to treat others.

Because of the many building projects and canals he ordered constructed throughout the region, Hammurabi was popularly titled bani matim, builder of the land.

• 1792–1750 B.C.E.
  Law Code Stele of King Hammurabi
  The Babylonian stele of basalt is dated to this span.^{14Law Code Stele of King Hammurabi (detail) · Smarthistory ↗}
• 1902
  Editio princeps
  Father Jean-Vincent Scheil published the editio princeps of the Code of Hammurabi.^{1Code of Hammurabi · Wikipedia ↗}
• 1947
  Code of Lipit-Ishtar rediscovered
  One of three earlier law collections rediscovered afterwards; shorter than Hammurabi's.^{1Code of Hammurabi · Wikipedia ↗}
• 1952
  Code of Ur-Nammu rediscovered
  Another of the three earlier collections, also shorter than Hammurabi's.^{1Code of Hammurabi · Wikipedia ↗}