Hammurabi’s laws

The Louvre’s Hammurabi stone is over 2.25 metres of black basalt carrying 282 rulings.

A stone in the Louvre

In the Louvre in Paris stands a block of black basalt more than 2.25 metres tall. At the top, a carved scene shows King Hammurabi of Babylon standing before the seated sun god Shamash, the god of justice. Below and around it, columns of cuneiform in the Akkadian language set out 282 legal rulings. The Louvre dates the text to about 1750 BCE, near the end of Hammurabi’s reign. By then he had conquered much of Mesopotamia from his city of Babylon.

Hammurabi’s reign is usually given as 1792 to 1750 BCE. Those figures follow the "middle chronology", the system most textbooks use. Other systems move them by decades, so you may also see 1848 to 1806 BCE or 1728 to 1686 BCE. The relative order of events is secure; only the exact year numbers shift.

If ..., then ...

The Louvre points out that this is not a law code in the modern sense but a collection of case law, judgements arranged by subject: family, property, trade and labour. Every ruling has the same shape. The first part, beginning with "if", describes a situation in detail; the second part gives the solution or punishment. The very first law says that if a man accuses another of murder and cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death. Other rulings set wages for farm workers, the hire of oxen, the fees and penalties for surgeons, and what happens when a debtor cannot pay.

Law 196 is the famous one: if a man puts out the eye of another man, his own eye shall be put out. But the next rulings change the answer by social rank. Under law 198, if he puts out the eye of a commoner, he pays one mina of silver (about half a kilogram), and under law 199, for a slave’s eye, he pays half the slave’s value. "An eye for an eye" applied between equals. Society had three main ranks, the free elite, commoners and slaves, and the law treated them differently.

Builders were responsible for their work too. Law 229 says that if a builder builds a house and does not make it strong, and the house collapses and kills its owner, the builder shall be put to death.

Older than Hammurabi

Hammurabi’s collection is not the oldest. The laws of Ur-Nammu, written in Sumerian about 2100 BCE, are the oldest law code known to survive, roughly 350 years older. The laws of Lipit-Ishtar and of the city of Eshnunna also come before Hammurabi. What makes his stele stand out is its length, its good condition and its public display. In the prologue Hammurabi says the gods called him to make justice visible in the land, to destroy the wicked, and to stop the strong from oppressing the weak. Scribes went on copying the text in schools for more than a thousand years.