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Code of Hammurabi
Unknown · c. 1792-1750 BC
A black finger of stone more than two metres high, this is the most complete law collection to survive from the ancient world. Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, had it carved near the end of a reign spent welding the quarrelsome city states of southern Mesopotamia into a single kingdom. The monument was not a statute book for judges to consult but a public act of royal self justification, set up in a temple so that any wronged man could come, hear the king's words read aloud, and bless his name. Roughly 282 rulings survive, framed by a long prologue and a furious epilogue cursing anyone who defaces the text.
The relief at the top shows Hammurabi standing in prayer before Shamash, god of the sun and of justice, who sits on a mountain throne with rays springing from his shoulders and holds out the rod and ring, emblems of straight measure and right order. Below, the surface is ruled into horizontal bands of exquisite Old Babylonian cuneiform, cut in a deliberately archaic script to lend the text the weight of antiquity. Look for the blank erased panel on the front, where a later conqueror began to carve his own inscription and never finished.
The stele was not found in Babylon at all. Jacques de Morgan's French mission unearthed it in three pieces at Susa in Iran during the winter of 1901 to 1902, where the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte had carried it as war booty around 1155 BC. Father Jean-Vincent Scheil translated it within months, and the text entered Western legal imagination almost overnight. Its most quoted provision, an eye for an eye, is in fact a limit on vengeance rather than a licence for it.
Did You Know? The blank rectangle gouged into the front is where the Elamite king who stole the stele started to carve his own triumphal inscription and then abandoned the job.
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