Code of Hammurabi

Of all the ancient Middle Eastern law codes, the one that is most well known is the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi was the sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylon. He was known to be the greatest ruler of ancient Babylonia but he was mainly known for his code of laws. In 1800 B.C. Hammurabi, the Amorite king, took the throne and became the new king of the Babylonian dynasty. Immediately after becoming king, Hammurabi expanded his empire which now included Assyria and northern Syria (source).

Hammurabi was known to be an outstanding military leader and lawgiver. In his first year of kingship, Hammurabi kept his promise to the Babylonian god, Marduk, and established a system of laws that went over almost every aspect of ancient life (source).

Some of the laws that Hammurabi wrote were based on the principle “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. (source). This means that if someone injures another person, that person shall be punished in the same way that he injured that person. For instance “if someone put out another’s eye, their eye would be put out in return”. (source). If anyone breaks a freeman’s bone, then his bone too, shall be broken. Today, his code may have seemed very brutal and cruel, but back then it was early attempt to create law (source).

Hammurabi required that people should be responsible for their own actions. The Code of Hammurabi consists of 282 laws, unfortunately, 34 of these codes have been lost. Hammurabi’s code was not meant to have laws against everything, but to provide rules and standards for every day life (source).

The code of Hammurabi is made up of legal decisions that he collected at the end of his reign and wrote them on a diorite stela that was set up in Babylon's temple of the god of justice, Marduk. The code is carved on an eight-foot high slab of black stone, which now sits in the Louvre Museum in France (source).

Those 282 case laws were arranged under the headings of personal property, real estate, economic provisions, family laws, criminal laws, and with civil laws. The penalties for someone depended on what they had done (source). The code basically protected the weak, but provided for retaliation and for cruel punishments.