A picture first, then the small print
Before you read a single law, the top of the stone tells you who is in charge. Shamash, the sun god and god of justice, sits on a throne with rays rising from his shoulders and his feet resting on a pattern of mountains. Hammurabi stands before him, one hand raised to his mouth in a gesture of respect. Between them, Shamash holds out a rod and a ring. Many scholars read them as surveyor’s tools, a measuring rod and a coiled cord, standing for fair measure and right order.
The scene is carved in low relief and it is very calm: no battle, no crowd, only a god who authorises and a king who listens. Anyone who couldn’t read, and that was most people, still got the message.
Who was Hammurabi?
He ruled Babylon from about 1792 to 1750 BCE and, by the end of his reign, controlled most of southern Mesopotamia, including cities such as Larsa and Mari. The stele was set up late in his reign, probably in a temple, and other copies existed in other cities. Writing and pictures had shared public monuments in the region for centuries, as on an earlier monument from Lagash, but none had set out a whole body of law like this one.
What the laws actually say
The text runs in three parts. A prologue explains that the gods chose Hammurabi to bring justice to the land and stop the strong from oppressing the weak. Then come about 282 laws in the traditional numbering. An epilogue blesses future kings who keep them and heaps curses on anyone who changes or erases the inscription.
Most laws follow one pattern: if someone does this, then this happens. They cover contracts and trade, with receipts and witnesses; loans and debts; theft; farming and irrigation, so that a man who neglects his canal bank and floods a neighbour’s field must pay for the lost grain; fees for builders, doctors and boatmen; marriage, divorce and inheritance; and injuries.
Some penalties are brutal. If a badly built house collapses and kills its owner, the builder is put to death. Destroy the eye of another free man and you lose your own, the principle later called “an eye for an eye”. Many cases, though, end with fines or compensation, and the penalty often depends on the social rank of the people involved. Even judges are covered: one who changes a sealed verdict pays twelve times the claim and loses his seat.
Was it really a law code?
Here is the surprise. Thousands of legal documents survive from Hammurabi’s time, contracts and court records among them, and they almost never cite the stele. That is why many historians read it less as a rulebook for judges and more as a royal statement: a monument proving that Hammurabi was the king who guaranteed justice. The laws themselves are not fantasy, though. As the Assyriologist Martha Roth has pointed out, the cases they describe match daily life in the records fairly closely.
Hard stone, cut by hand
We don’t know who carved it. The stone is basalt, hard and dark, polished so that the figures and the wedges of the script catch the light, and every one of the thousands of signs had to be cut, since hard stone can’t be pressed like clay. Choosing hard dark stone for a royal message was already an old habit in Mesopotamia: it said permanence.
From Babylonia to Susa to Paris
The curses didn’t help much. Around 1158 BCE the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte raided Babylonia and carried the stele off to Susa, his capital in what is now south-west Iran. Someone there began erasing several columns at the bottom of the front, apparently to add a new inscription that was never carved.
French excavators led by Jacques de Morgan found it at Susa in the winter of 1901 to 1902, in pieces. It was reassembled and taken to Paris, and the text was published in 1902. Today it stands in the Louvre, with the erased gap still visible near the base.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, “Code de Hammurabi, roi de Babylone” (Sb 8).
- M. T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Scholars Press, 1995).
- K. E. Slanski, “The Mesopotamian ‘Rod and Ring’: Icon of Righteous Kingship and Balance of Power between Palace and Temple” (2007).
- T. Ornan, “Unfinished Business: The Relief on the Hammurabi Louvre Stele Revisited” (2019).
- Archaeology Magazine, “Cuneiform Laws” (May/June 2016).
- Ministère de la Culture, “Jacques de Morgan”: the Law Code of Hammurabi.
