Hammurabi's Law

Collection of ancient Babylonian laws carved on a diorite stele or slab; developed and promulgated by King Hammurabi of Babylonia around 1700 BCE. Comprised of 3,600 lines of Akkadian cuneiform (a Semitic writing), the laws were Hammurabi's decisions about civil, commercial, criminal, familial, and other matters; they were humanitarian on the whole, but did include some primitive customs (like trial by ordeal) and retributive punishment (i.e., an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). The code's purpose was explained at the start: "Before this portrait [of Hammurabi, at the top of the stele] let every man who has a legal dispute come forward, read the text, and heed its precious words." The stele, which was placed in Babylon's temple of Marduk (the chief god), was taken away by a conquering Elamite king about 1000 BCE ; it was uncovered by Frenchmen at Susa (a ruined city in western Iran) in 1901 and deposited in the Louvre Museum in Paris (Richardson, 45-55).

The ancient Near East produced the first known written laws, in the form of decrees handed down by kings. Typically, they were first read to the populace and then inscribed on clay tablets. Later, all the royal edicts of a particular ruler would be engraved on a stone pillar, called a stela. The laws carved on the stelae were often organized in no particular order, with criminal and civil laws, covering a variety of legal issues, being mixed indiscriminately. Crimes such as murder, thievery, and assault were addressed, as were civil issues, including inheritance, land ownership, and divorce. Some codes also specified wages and prices and regulated the sale and treatment of slaves. Each king's legal code often superseded the laws of his predecessors. This practice did not mean, however, that older laws were necessarily discarded. Instead, laws from earlier codes were frequently brought forward and copied word for word by the new king (Willetts, 77-81).

In addition to these written legal codes, a large body of unwritten laws may also have existed. These unwritten laws would have been passed down orally through the centuries. Some would eventually have been incorporated into the written legal record. It is remarkable that in the thousands of legal texts—records of judgments in cases of divorce, land sales, slave sales, and so on—the law code of Hammurabi is never referred to.

From the beginning much of ancient Near Eastern law was what would later be called lex talionis, or the law of equivalent retaliation. Often described as a "tooth for a tooth" or an "eye for any eye," lex talionis required the punishment to mirror the crime. Thus a man who broke another's arm had his own arm broken. If he caused the death of someone else's child, he had to give up the life of one of his own children. However, it was not unusual for a fine to be substituted for the punishment. Ancient Near Eastern law did not apply equally to all. Aristocrats normally paid higher fines than commoners, while commoners ...