The king and the stone
Hammurabi (reigned c. 1792-1750 BC) turned the city-state of Babylon into a Mesopotamian empire by war and canal-digging in roughly equal measure, and near the end of his reign published his laws in the era’s most durable medium: a basalt stele over two metres tall, its crown showing the king receiving the rod and ring of authority from Shamash, god of the sun and of justice, above nearly 4,000 lines of elegant Akkadian cuneiform. Copies stood in temples across the realm; scribes studied the text for a thousand years.
What the laws say
Between a boastful prologue and a curse-laden epilogue run some 282 provisions — not an abstract legal code in the modern sense, scholars stress, but a monumental anthology of royal justice: precedents, tariffs, and ideals published so that “the strong might not oppress the weak.” The famous principle is lex talionis — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a builder put to death if his house collapses and kills the owner (and the builder’s son put to death if it kills the owner’s son). Less famous is the social arithmetic: blinding a gentleman’s eye cost an eye, blinding a commoner’s cost silver, and injuries to the enslaved were property damage — equality before the law was not the aspiration. Alongside the brutality sits striking modernity: regulated wages and fees (a surgeon’s rate for successful eye surgery — and the loss of his hand for fatal malpractice), divorce and dowry rights that gave women defined (if unequal) protections, rules on debt slavery’s duration, tavern regulation, and evidentiary standards including judicial oaths and the river ordeal for unprovable accusations: the accused jumped in the Euphrates and the river ruled.
Hammurabi’s was not the first such collection — Ur-Nammu’s laws precede it by three centuries — but it is by far the most complete to survive, and its resonances in later Near Eastern law, including the Hebrew Bible’s, have kept comparative scholars employed since the day of its rediscovery.
The stele’s own story
That rediscovery carries the best irony: the stele survived because it was stolen. Around 1155 BC the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte looted it from Babylonia to his capital Susa in Iran, where French excavators found it in three pieces in 1901-02. The monument proclaiming eternal justice travelled to the Louvre as archaeology’s prize — an object lesson, twice over, in how law, loot, and empire circulate. Hammurabi himself gazes from a marble relief in the US House of Representatives chamber, among history’s lawgivers: the Babylonian king still on the wall of a parliament 3,700 years on.