The Code of Hammurabi

The story

A black stone among the ruins of Susa

In December 1901 a team of French archaeologists, led by Jacques de Morgan, was digging at Susa, in present-day south-western Iran, an ancient capital of the Elamites. Out of the earth came large pieces of a black, shiny stone, covered with cuneiform writing. Put back together, they formed a block of basalt two metres twenty-five tall, in the shape of a finger. At the top was a relief: a king standing, with his hand raised in a sign of respect, before a god seated on a throne. Below, columns and columns of signs. The Dominican father Jean-Vincent Scheil, a cuneiform scholar, began to translate and understood: it was the text of a collection of laws commissioned by Hammurabi, king of Babylon.

It was published in 1902 and caused a sensation. It was not the first collection of laws (we know older ones, like that of Ur-Nammu), but it was the most complete and best preserved, and for the first time the modern world was reading laws written more than 3,600 years earlier. The stele is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Who Hammurabi was

Hammurabi (in Akkadian Ammurapi) became king of Babylon around 1792 BC and reigned for about forty-three years. Babylon, at that time, was only one of the city-states of Mesopotamia, big but not the most powerful. Through diplomacy and war Hammurabi turned it into the centre of a kingdom. First he allied himself with his neighbours, then defeated them one by one: in 1763 he beat Rim-Sin of Larsa and in 1761 he destroyed Mari, on the Euphrates. In the end he ruled much of Mesopotamia.

He was a king very attentive to organisation. The letters that survive show that he dealt with canals, disputes between farmers, taxes and even small details: he wrote to an official telling him to send workers at once to clear a canal. He considered himself the “shepherd” of his people, chosen by the gods to make justice reign.

How the stele is made

The text is divided into three parts. In the prologue the king lists his titles and the cities he has protected, and says that the gods called him “to make justice shine in the land, to destroy the wicked and the violent, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak”. Next comes the body of the text, with about two hundred and eighty paragraphs, always built with the same formula: “If a man does this, this will happen to him.” The epilogue contains blessings for those who respect the laws and terrible curses for those who erase them.

The laws concern everyday life: thefts, debts, prices, rents of fields, marriages, inheritances, slaves, trades, doctors, builders. Some are very harsh. Law 229 says that if a builder makes a house that is not sturdy and it collapses and kills the owner, the builder will be put to death. Others provide for the famous “an eye for an eye”: if a free man blinds another free man, he will lose an eye. But the penalty changed according to social class: if the victim was a man of lower status, it was enough to pay a sum of silver. The laws, then, were not the same for everyone.

Other laws protect the weakest: for example, a farmer does not have to repay a debt in a year when the harvest is lost to a storm; a woman has a right to her dowry and is protected if her husband leaves her without reason; there are official rates for doctors, boatmen, workers. In a trial that would seem cruel but was normal then, a person accused of sorcery had to throw himself into the river: if he drowned he was guilty, if he was saved he was innocent.

A written and visible law

The stele was not a book to be read in a library, but a monument. It was meant to be seen by everyone. The relief shows the god Shamash, lord of the Sun and of justice, giving the king the symbols of power, a rod and a ring. The message is clear: the laws come from the gods and the king is their guarantor. Some scholars have observed that very few people could read then, so the stele served more to impress than to be read. What is certain is that the text was copied for centuries in the scribes' schools.

How it came to Susa

The stele was not carved at Susa. Scholars think it stood in a city of Babylonia and that in the 12th century BC the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte, after a victory, carried it off as booty along with other monuments. On the stone some columns of laws (seven, it seems) were erased by smoothing them, perhaps to have his own name written in their place. He never did. This detail explains why some laws are missing: they are the ones that were erased.

The value and the limits

It is often said that the Code of Hammurabi is the first written law or a “code” like modern ones. Neither statement is entirely right. It is not the oldest, and it is not a code, because it does not seem to be a text that judges applied to the letter: in the trials we know of, judges almost never cite it. It is rather a collection of exemplary decisions, and a political manifesto of the just king.