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Hammurabi: King Hammurabi
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Hammurabi was an active and capable administrator. After establishing a central government at Babylon, he devoted his energies to protecting the frontiers of his empire and improving its prosperity. The king and his ministers headed a well-organized administrative system. The government concerned itself with national defense, the administration of justice, the direction of agricultural production, and the collection of taxes. Throughout Hammurabi’s long reign he personally supervised many aspects of these activities, as historians know from clay tablets that carry his instructions. For example, he provided details on the cleaning of the irrigation canals.
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King Hammurabi is the best known of the early monarchs of ancient times due to his famous law code, found inscribed on stone. This great lawgiver of ancient Babylon belonged to the First Baby-Ionian Dynasty which came to an end, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, some three or four generations after Hammurabi. For the next several centuries, the land was in the domain of a people known as the Kassites. They left few examples of art and hardly any literary works—theirs was an age comparable to and contemporaneous with that of the Hyksos in Egypt, and various surmises were made as to the identity of the two peoples. A cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan was even found in Babylonia1 and another in Anatolia,2 a possible indication of the extent of the power and influence wielded by the Hyksos.
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Hammurabi was the king of the city-state of Babylon. About 1800BC, Hammurabi conquered the nearby city-states and created the kingdom of Babylonia. He recorded a system of laws called the Code of Hammurabi. The 282 laws were engraved in stone and placed in a public location for everyone to see. Hammurabi required that people be responsible for their actions. Some of Hammurabi’s laws were based on the principle “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This means that whoever commits an injury should be punished in the same manner as that injury.
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The discovery of Hammurabi's Code has raised him to a leading place in the roll of the greatest men of antiquity. This wonderful document was unearthed partly in Dec., 1901, and partly in Jan., 1902, by the French Délégation en Perse, under M. de Morgan, in their excavations at Susa, once the capital of Elam and, later, of Persia. The stele containing the Code is an obelisk-like block of black diorite measuring 7 ft. 4½ in. in height and 6 ft 9½ in. in circumference at the base. With the exception of a large carving in relief on the upper end, it was once entirely convered with forty-four columns (over 3800 lines) of text in the old Babylonian wedge-writing. From the inscription we learn that it was engraved for the temple of Shamash at Sippar, and that another copy stood in the temple of Marduk in the city of Babylon, and the discovery of various fragments make it probable that more copies had been set up in different cities. This stele, now in the Louvre Museum, was carried off from Sippar, about 1120 B. C., by Shutruk-Nahhunte, King of Elam, who set it in his capital as a trophy of his victory.
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Like king Urukagina of Lagash and the pharaoh Amenemhet and others, Hammurabi wished to promote what he saw as welfare and justice for his subjects. He saw that contracts between people had to be witnessed and ratified, that deeds of partnership had to be maintained, that properties had to be registered and wills written. Hammurabi established laws that protected landholders from the landless. He regulated the treatment of women and slaves. He made a doctor liable if the doctor made his patient worse, and an architect might be executed if his negligence resulted in the collapse of a house he had designed.
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Hammurabi was not the first king of the Sumerians/Babylonians, nor the first to have a code of laws. He lived in the 18th century bce (Before Current Era, or B.C.). Zargon or Gilgamesh is reported to have been the King who first brought prescribed laws to the people, in about 2700 bce, though both of these may just be mythical persons. Before then, laws were determined by how the king felt at the time. What Hammurabi really did was write it down, and make sure everyone could know the law.
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King Hammurabi