Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, unified Mesopotamia under a single legal code inscribed on a basalt stele nearly eight feet tall. His laws, organized around the principle of proportional retribution captured in the phrase 'an eye for an eye,' governed commerce, family life, and criminal punishment for a population spanning modern Iraq, and profoundly influenced subsequent legal traditions across the ancient Near East.
The Code of Hammurabi, carved sometime in the 1750s BC toward the end of his roughly 42-year reign, was not the first law code in Mesopotamian history, but it is the most complete surviving example, with 282 laws addressing everything from wages for an ox-driver to the penalties for a surgeon whose patient dies under the knife.
What makes the code remarkable is its granularity and its assumption of social stratification: punishments differed sharply depending on whether victim and perpetrator were nobles, commoners, or slaves. A noble who blinded another noble's eye would lose his own, but if he blinded a commoner's eye, he merely paid a fine, a codification of inequality as much as justice.
The stele itself, now in the Louvre, was discovered by French archaeologists at Susa in 1901, having been carried off as war booty by an Elamite king centuries after Hammurabi's death. Because we lack precise day-level dating for events this ancient, historians place the closing years of his reign and the code's promulgation broadly in this era, a legal document still studied today as a foundation stone of written law.
Key people: Hammurabi