by Marie Antonia Parsons

Created on: December 02, 2009

King Hammurabi is best-known for the Code of Laws he left. While his motives for inscribing almost 300 laws, they provide a window into the social and political life of the Babylonians. Perhaps more importantly for us today, his description of his rule also illustrates that, at the least, he wanted to be understood by both his gods and his people that he was a just ruler.

Who Was Hammurabi

Hammurabi took the throne in 1792 BCE, at about the time when Egypt was moving from the glory in a united Middle Kingdom to its division under Hyksos overlords. The cities of the Indus civilization were in decline, but according to tradition, the Shang Dynasty in China was then established. The Minoans still sailed the Aegean and Mycenae had yet to rise to fight the Trojan War. Rome did not yet exist, but Stonehenge had already stood on the Salisbury Plain for hundreds of years.

Hammurabi was one of a long line of kings in Mesopotamia. Sargon, king of Akkad, whose legendary origins gave a foretaste of the later Moses, preceded him, but left behind little more than myth. Most of our knowledge of Mesopotamia involves cities and conquests. Babylon had already existed as a city for several centuries, and those kings who had ruled before Hammurabi had expanded its territories, although it was still bordered by other prominent city-states. But under Hammurabi, Babylon began a period of political dominance over southern Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamian Kingship

The idea of kingship at the time was that the king acted as shepherd and farmer, put there by the gods to take care of his people, and his people expected nothing less. Hammurabi involved himself in the smallest details around his lands. In the prologue to his Code, he stated that he was indeed the shepherd who brings peace, whose scepter is just. Hammurabi was not the first king to establish a code of laws. But nothing has been found of the Code of Urukagina, who reigned about five hundred years prior to Hammurabi, and the Code of Ur-Nammu, written three hundred years before, contains less than a quarter of the laws and charges the death penalty for robbery, murder, and other violent crimes.

Description of Code Tablet

Hammurabi's Code was discovered far from Babylon, in the city of Susa, where it had been carried as plunder five hundred years after Hammurabi. The laws are inscribed in the wedge-shaped cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia on a stela carved from black diorite. The inscription is the longest from the early Mesopotamian history.

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