Code of Hammurabi: Babylon's Famous Law Code of 1754 BC

The Code of Hammurabi is a collection of about 282 laws proclaimed by Hammurabi, king of Babylon, around 1754 BC and carved on a tall basalt stele. It covers crime, family life, trade, property, wages and professional liability, and it famously applies the principle of “an eye for an eye” to some injuries. As the longest and best-preserved law collection of the ancient Near East, it is one of the most important documents for understanding how early societies thought about justice.

Background: Hammurabi and Babylon

Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, a line of Amorite rulers. Using the widely accepted middle chronology, he reigned from about 1792 to 1750 BC. When he came to the throne, Babylon was one of several competing city-states in Mesopotamia, alongside powers such as Larsa, Eshnunna, Mari and Assyria.

Over roughly three decades of diplomacy and war, Hammurabi defeated his rivals. He conquered Larsa around 1763 BC and Mari soon afterwards, uniting southern and central Mesopotamia under Babylon, a story told in Hammurabi’s Conquests. The law code belongs to the last years of his reign, when he presented himself as a king who had brought order and justice to a newly unified land.

Hammurabi did not invent the idea of written law. Earlier Mesopotamian rulers had issued collections of legal rulings, among them the Laws of Ur-Nammu of Ur (c. 2100 BC), the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (c. 1930 BC) and the Laws of Eshnunna. All of them were written in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script that had developed in Sumer more than a thousand years earlier, as described in Invention of Cuneiform.

The stele and its text

The best-known copy of the code is a stele (an upright inscribed stone) of black basalt about 2.25 metres (7 ft 4 in) tall. At the top is a carved relief showing Hammurabi standing respectfully before a seated god, usually identified as Shamash, the sun god and divine guardian of justice. The god holds out a rod and ring, symbols of royal authority.

Below the relief, the text runs in columns around the stone. It is written in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Babylonia, using an old-fashioned monumental style of cuneiform. The inscription has three parts:

• A prologue listing Hammurabi’s titles, the cities he cared for and the gods who chose him to establish justice in the land.
• The laws themselves, about 282 in the conventional modern numbering.
• An epilogue in which the king says he set up the stele so that the strong should not oppress the weak and so that anyone wronged could have the inscription read to them. It ends with long curses on any future ruler who alters or removes it.

Several columns on the front lower part of the stele were deliberately erased in antiquity, probably on the orders of the Elamite king who carried it off. Scholars have restored part of the missing section, roughly laws 66 to 99, from other copies of the text written on clay tablets.

The numbering of the laws is modern. Babylonian scribes did not number them, and the figure of 282 depends on how the erased section is reconstructed.

What the laws said

Each law follows the same pattern: a case (“If a man…”) followed by a ruling. This casuistic style suggests the laws were built up from real or imagined legal decisions rather than from abstract principles. The main subjects include:

• Justice and procedure. The first laws deal with false accusations. A man who accused another of murder but could not prove it was himself to be put to death. Some disputes, such as charges of sorcery, were settled by the river ordeal: the accused plunged into the river, and the outcome was taken as the gods’ verdict.
• Property and theft. Theft from a temple or palace carried heavy penalties, often death or a fine of many times the value stolen.
• Agriculture and irrigation. Farmers who neglected their dykes and flooded a neighbour’s field had to compensate for the lost grain.
• Trade, loans and debt. The code regulated merchants, interest and debt bondage, limiting the service of a family member pledged for debt to three years.
• Family law. About a quarter of the laws concern marriage, dowries, divorce, adoption and inheritance. A wife could in some circumstances leave a husband who neglected her and take her dowry with her.
• Wages and professional liability. The code fixed hire rates for labourers, boats and oxen and set fees for doctors. A builder whose badly built house collapsed and killed its owner was to be put to death.

Punishment and social class

The code is famous for retaliation in kind, known by the Latin phrase lex talionis. If a man destroyed the eye of another man of the free elite class (the awilum), his own eye was to be destroyed; a broken bone was punished with a broken bone.

But the penalties depended on social status. Babylonian society was divided into three broad groups: the awilum (free persons of full standing), the mushkenum (commoners or dependants, whose exact status is debated) and the wardum (slaves). Injuring a commoner usually cost a payment in silver, and injuring someone else’s slave meant compensating the owner. Punishments could be severe, including death, mutilation and drowning, but many offences were settled by fines.

Was it a real law code?

Modern readers often assume the code was a statute book that judges had to follow. Most specialists now doubt this. Tens of thousands of legal documents survive from the Old Babylonian period, including contracts, letters and court records, yet they almost never refer to the code or quote it.

Many historians therefore read the stele as a royal monument with several purposes. It displayed Hammurabi as a just king chosen by the gods, gave examples of sound legal reasoning, and served as a model for scribes and judges. It is likely that ordinary courts relied on custom and local practice, with the code as an ideal rather than a binding rulebook.

Copies, capture and rediscovery

The code was clearly famous in its own time. Fragments of other stelae carrying the same text have been found, and scribes copied the laws onto clay tablets for well over a thousand years, including copies found in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the 7th century BC.

The Louvre stele was probably first set up in Sippar, a city sacred to Shamash. Around 1158 BC the Elamite king Shutruk-Nakhunte raided Babylonia and carried it back to his capital, Susa, in what is now south-western Iran, together with other famous monuments. This episode is told in Shutruk-Nakhunte’s Sack of Babylon. The erased columns suggest he intended to add his own inscription, but none survives on the stone.

The stele lay buried at Susa for some three thousand years. A French archaeological mission directed by Jacques de Morgan found it, broken into three pieces, in December 1901 and January 1902. The Assyriologist Jean-Vincent Scheil published a transcription and French translation in 1902, and the stele went to the Louvre, where it is catalogued as Sb 8.

Myths and facts

• Myth: it was the first law code. At least three older Mesopotamian law collections are known. Hammurabi’s is the longest and best preserved.
• Myth: it applied “an eye for an eye” to everyone. Retaliation in kind applied mainly between free persons of high status. Injuries to commoners and slaves were usually compensated with silver.
• Myth: it introduced the presumption of innocence. The code punishes false accusers and requires proof and witnesses in many cases, but the presumption of innocence as a formal legal principle is a much later development.
• Fact: Hammurabi credited the gods. The prologue and the relief present the laws as justice entrusted to the king by the gods, not as a purely human invention.

Legacy

The Code of Hammurabi transformed modern understanding of ancient law. Its discovery showed that legal traditions in Mesopotamia were long and sophisticated, and it invited comparison with later systems, including the laws of the Hebrew Bible, which share similar case-law forms and the eye-for-an-eye formula. Scholars generally explain these parallels as shared legal traditions of the ancient Near East rather than direct copying.

Hammurabi has become a symbol of the rule of law. He appears among the great lawgivers in a marble relief portrait in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives and in the frieze of the US Supreme Court courtroom. Casts of the stele are displayed in museums and universities around the world.

Timeline

• c. 1792 BC: Hammurabi becomes king of Babylon (middle chronology).
• c. 1763 BC: Hammurabi conquers Larsa, gaining control of southern Mesopotamia.
• c. 1761–1759 BC: Babylon defeats and later destroys Mari on the Euphrates.
• c. 1755–1750 BC: The law code is composed and set up on stelae; c. 1754 BC is a commonly cited date.
• c. 1750 BC: Death of Hammurabi; his son Samsu-iluna succeeds him.
• c. 1158 BC: Shutruk-Nakhunte of Elam carries the stele to Susa as plunder.
• 7th century BC: Copies of the laws are kept in Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh.
• 1901–1902: Jacques de Morgan’s mission finds the stele at Susa in three pieces.
• 1902: Jean-Vincent Scheil publishes the first translation; the stele enters the Louvre.

Why it matters

The Code of Hammurabi is the fullest window we have on law and daily life in early Mesopotamia, from marriage contracts to builders’ liability. It shows an ancient state trying to define justice in writing, while revealing how deeply that justice depended on social rank. Nearly four thousand years later, it remains a touchstone in debates about where the rule of law began.