Hammurabi (hah-moo-ROB-ee) began ruling in 1792 B. C. and quickly distinguished himself as a leader of great
Stele depicting King Hammurabi dispensing Code of Laws. Corbis. Reproduced by permission.
Power. He thwarted, or frustrated, the ambitions of a neighboring king to take over Isin (EE-zin), an important neighboring city, and over the next thirty years defeated the kings of all surrounding regions. Eventually the empire of Hammurabi stretched from Babylon, in the southern part of modern-day Iraq, all the way to the Mediterranean Sea far in the west. He also built many ziggurats and great fortifications (defensive walls) to protect his nation from foreign conquest. But the greatest achievement of Hammurabi was his legal code, or system of laws.
He was probably not the first leader to create laws, but Hammurabi's is certainly the oldest surviving code, and it continues to influence the law of modern times. The law was written on a stele (STEE-lee), a great stone pillar which bore at the top a carved picture (or a relief sculpture) of Hammurabi receiving the laws from Shamash (SHAH-mosh), the god of justice.
Aspects of Hammurabi's code might not seem very fair to modern people. Its justice is built around the idea of “an eye for an eye,” and its punishments relate to a person's social rank. Babylonian society was sharply divided according to classes—rich, middle class, and slaves. The rich, or free people, were by far the smallest (but also the most influential) group in society. Next came the common people or middle class, which were a somewhat larger but much less powerful force in Babylonia. At the bottom rung were the slaves, who were the most plentiful group and the lowest-ranking but who nonetheless enjoyed some rights.
The Code of Hammurabi clearly established more harsh penalties for a wrong done to a rich person than for one done to a slave, but it was a remarkable legal code because it offered some protection for the more unfortunate members of society [see sidebar “The Code of Hammurabi”]. Nor was Hammurabi's code the only great achievement of Babylonia, which made many advances in mathematics and science as well as law.
World History
