The world's most famous ancient law code may not have been law at all.
Composed in Babylon around 1753 BC, the Code of Hammurabi sets out a long list of rulings, including 'an eye for an eye'. It is celebrated as a founding text of law. Yet among thousands of surviving Mesopotamian legal documents, not one clearly cites it, and many judgments contradict it. So what was it for?
Hammurabi ruled Babylon from about 1792 to 1750 BC and built it into the dominant power in Mesopotamia through war, diplomacy and, when it suited him, betrayal of his allies. Near the end of his reign he had a text inscribed on stone: a poetic prologue and epilogue framing a long series of 'if ... then' rulings on crime, family, property and trade. The prologue claims the gods gave him power to stop the strong from oppressing the weak. The best copy is a 2.25-metre stele topped by a relief of the king before Shamash, the sun god and god of justice.
That stele travelled. It was carried off as plunder, about 600 years after it was made, to the Elamite city of Susa in present-day Iran, where French archaeologists found it in 1901. It is now in the Louvre. Some columns appear to have been erased, perhaps by the Elamite king who took it. Early commentators hailed it as the oldest code of laws in the world, but older collections, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, were identified later.
Its contents can shock. Punishments depended on social class and gender. If a badly built house collapsed and killed the owner's son, the builder's son was to be put to death. But there are familiar ideas too: penalties for unproven accusations, a high value on written evidence, and an instruction that a wronged man could have the stele read aloud to him.
The big debate is about purpose. If it was legislation, it was an odd kind: it skips vital areas of the economy, covers improbable situations such as threshing grain with goats, and, as Benno Landsberger pointed out in 1950, judges seem to have ignored it. Some scholars see it as a record of past cases. A view with growing support among Assyriologists is that it was a work of scholarship, a treatise on how legal judgments should be reasoned. Scribes copied it for more than a thousand years, and his relief portrait looks down from the US Capitol.
Source: Wikipedia — Code of Hammurabi · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
