The stele and its date
The laws of Hammurabi are the best-known legal text from the ancient world, but they are not the oldest, and Hammurabi was not the first lawgiver. Earlier Sumerian and Akkadian collections survive, and the Code of Ur-Nammu predates this one by roughly three centuries. What sets Hammurabi’s text apart is its length, its state of preservation and the fact that it survives on an imposing monument.
Hammurabi was the sixth king of the Amorite dynasty of Babylon and reigned for about four decades in the 1700s BCE; the exact dates depend on the chronology used, and the middle chronology gives about 1792-1750 BCE. The stele is usually dated near the end of his reign, around 1754 BCE, after he had united much of southern Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule and defeated rivals such as Larsa.
The monument is a tall block of dark stone, usually described as basalt, a little over two metres high. At the top is a relief showing the king standing before a seated god, normally identified as Shamash, the god of the sun and justice. Below, the text is written in Akkadian cuneiform, in a formal, archaic-looking style of script.
Structure: prologue, laws, epilogue
The text has three parts.
- The prologue names the gods who granted Hammurabi kingship and lists the cities he restored and protected. It presents him as chosen to make justice prevail in the land and to protect the weak from the strong.
- The laws are the central section. Modern editors number them at around 280, though the number varies with how the damaged parts are counted. Each typically begins with “if” and states a case followed by its consequence.
- The epilogue boasts of the king’s justice, invites wronged people to read the stele, and calls down curses on any later ruler who changes or erases the text.
The topics are wide. There are rules on false accusations and witnesses, theft, land and irrigation, tenant farming, debt, merchants and agents, tavern keepers, marriage, dowries and inheritance, adoption, assault, builders and boatmen, hired workers, doctors and herding. It reads as a broad survey of urban and rural life in Babylonian society, and it reveals which disputes lawmakers expected, even if it does not cover every possible case.
“An eye for an eye”
The stele is famous for the principle called talion, where the penalty matches the injury. If a man destroys the eye of another man of his own rank, his own eye is to be destroyed. If a man breaks another man’s bone, his bone is broken. The text also says that a son who strikes his father shall have his hand cut off, and that a builder whose poorly built house collapses and kills its owner shall be put to death.
The principle is narrower than the slogan suggests. The matching punishment applies mainly when both parties are of equal standing. Injuries to someone of lower status are usually settled with payments in silver. Some penalties also fall on the offender’s family instead: if a collapsed house kills the owner’s son, the builder’s son may be put to death. Modern readers often see this as harsh, and many historians think the talion rules were partly a way of limiting private vengeance by setting a clear boundary.
Class distinctions
The stele separates three groups: the awilum, a free man of the upper or full-citizen class; the mushkenum, a term that is debated but usually taken to mean a dependent or commoner of lower rank; and the slave. The penalty for harming someone depended on which group the victim belonged to. A blow to a noble’s eye brings talion; a blow to a commoner’s eye costs a mina of silver; and a blow to a slave’s eye costs half the slave’s value, paid to the owner. Fees for surgeons and fines for their failures also vary by the patient’s rank. Social position, not only the act, shaped justice.
Trials, ordeals and evidence
The text assumes courts, judges, witnesses and written records. Several provisions require contracts to be written and sealed. Where evidence was lacking, the stele allows an ordeal: a person accused of sorcery, for example, is thrown into the river, and the outcome is taken as the divine verdict. A judge who changes a verdict after it has been recorded is fined and removed. Such rules suggest an interest in orderly procedure, with Babylonian administration relying on officials, archives and sealed tablets.
Rediscovery at Susa
The stele did not stay in Babylonia. In the twelfth century BCE, the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte brought it to Susa in what is now southwestern Iran, as part of the spoils of a campaign into Mesopotamia, and it was buried there for roughly three thousand years. Several columns of text were ground away, apparently to carve in his own inscription, although it was never added.
A French expedition led by Jacques de Morgan excavated the ancient city of Susa. In the winter of 1901-1902, the team found the stele in three large fragments. It was soon taken to Paris, and the French Assyriologist Vincent Scheil published the first translation in 1902. It now stands in the Louvre. The erased columns were mostly restored from other copies of the text.
Legacy and debate
The first reaction was often to call it the oldest law code or to compare it with the laws of the Hebrew Bible. Both comparisons need care. Parallels exist, such as talion, but scholars disagree about whether there was direct influence or only a shared tradition of Near Eastern law.
A more serious question is how the laws worked. Surviving court records almost never refer to the stele’s rules by number, and judges seem to have decided cases on custom and the particulars. Some historians therefore see it as a monument to royal justice, not a code that judges applied as statute. Even so, scribes copied it for centuries, which shows it was valued as a model. In later centuries, a monument of such ambition inspired comparisons with Roman civil law, though the links are indirect.