Hammurabi's Code in Stone: The Babylonian King Behind \"An Eye for an Eye\"

Hammurabi's Code applied "an eye for an eye" quite literally: laws 196 and 200 say that if one man destroys another's eye or tooth, his own eye or tooth shall be destroyed in return, a principle known as lex talionis. The code was issued by Hammurabi, the sixth Amorite king of Babylon, who reigned from about 1792 to 1750 BC and turned a small kingdom into the leading power of Mesopotamia. Yet "eye for an eye" is only one thread of a long, surprisingly detailed text, and the punishment you received depended heavily on who you were. Here is the king, the stone and the laws, explained simply.

A king who started small

Hammurabi was the son of the Babylonian king Sin-muballit, and nobody knows exactly when he was born or how old he was when he took the throne. Because he reigned for 43 years, he may have been very young at his accession, although he might also already have been in his twenties or thirties. At the start of his reign Babylon had limited territory and was surrounded by rivals; it was not yet the great city we think of today.

The first two decades of his reign are poorly documented. Babylonian kings named each year after an important event, and the names of Hammurabi's early years mostly refer to building work and offerings to gods, with only a few short military campaigns. In other words, for a long time he looked like one ambitious ruler among many in a crowded region.

From city king to ruler of Mesopotamia

Everything changed in the second half of his reign. Working at first in alliance with Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, Hammurabi launched a lightning war against the southern kingdom of Larsa and annexed it in 1763 BC, gaining control of the whole lower Mesopotamian plain. Kings had tried and failed to do this for more than two centuries, so it was a real turning point. He then defeated Eshnunna and turned on his former ally: Mari was captured and destroyed between 1761 and 1759 BC.

By the end of these campaigns he had conquered the powerful kingdoms of Larsa, Eshnunna and Mari and brought almost all of Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule. Historians can follow much of this in unusual detail because letters dug up at Larsa and Mari show how he exercised power, which makes his reign one of the best documented in Mesopotamian history. He died around 1750 BC, in the 43rd year of his reign, apparently after a period of illness, and his son Samsu-iluna took over.

The stele: a law code carved in black stone

The Code of Hammurabi was composed around 1753 BC, near the end of his reign, in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, and its main copy is carved on a tall basalt stele. At the top, a relief shows Hammurabi with Shamash, the sun god and god of justice. Below it are about 4,130 lines of cuneiform: one fifth is a poetic prologue and epilogue, and four fifths are the laws themselves. In the prologue Hammurabi claims the gods granted him his rule "to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak".

The stone has had an adventurous life. It was rediscovered in 1901 at Susa, in present-day Iran, where it had been carried off as plunder roughly 600 years after it was made, and today it stands in the Louvre in Paris. Near the bottom, several columns of laws were polished away in ancient times; the scholar who first published the stone suggested that the Elamite king who took it wanted to carve his own inscription there. Even so, the code is the longest, best organised and best preserved legal text from the ancient Near East.

How the laws are written

Modern historians count 282 law provisions, arranged by theme: courts and trials, property, farming, money, family, assault, rules for different professions and the ownership of slaves. Each law is written as a case: "if" something happens, "then" this is the remedy. This style is called casuistic, and it is easy to imagine a judge or a scribe looking up a situation that matched the one in front of him.

Not every law is about punishment. The code fixed prices for goods, introduced a maximum interest rate of 20 percent and set wages, with higher pay for seasonal workers. Its very first laws punish people who make accusations they cannot prove, which some scholars see as an early form of the presumption of innocence, and written evidence was highly valued, especially for contracts.

What "an eye for an eye" really meant

The eye-for-an-eye principle is real, but it worked within a society that was openly unequal. People were not equal before the law: class and gender, as well as age and profession, decided the punishment or compensation they received. The code speaks of three main groups, roughly a free "gentleman", a "commoner" and a slave, and the rules for each were different.

Some laws even pass the punishment on to a wrongdoer's children. If a badly built house collapsed and killed the owner, the builder was to die; if it killed the owner's son, the builder's son was to die. To modern readers this is shocking, yet some commentators have pointed out that the code's punishments are, in places, no more severe than those of much later legal systems.

Was it really a law code?

Here scholars disagree. Many see the laws as a technical, scholarly exercise by scribes: a description of good legal decisions based on real practice, rather than a rulebook judges had to follow. Others think they could serve as models for people administering justice. Its prologue and epilogue also make it a monument celebrating Hammurabi as a just king and preserving his memory. It was not the first such collection either; older ones such as the Code of Ur-Nammu and the Laws of Eshnunna survive.

Legacy

Hammurabi's empire did not last. His son lost the southern part of the kingdom to revolts, and the dynasty ended with a Hittite attack in 1595 BC. Over time his image as a conqueror faded, and he came to be remembered above all as the ideal lawgiver. Since the discovery of the stele, scholars have debated how far the code influenced the Biblical laws of Exodus, which share the "if... then" style and the eye-for-an-eye principle. Today his portrait appears among the great lawgivers in the chamber of the US House of Representatives, and copies of the stele stand at the United Nations headquarters in New York and elsewhere.

Learn with Hammurabi: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
an eye for an eye	punishment equal to the harm done	He believes in an eye for an eye.
set in stone	fixed and impossible to change	The plan is not set in stone yet.
to lay down the law	to state rules firmly	The new manager laid down the law.
the burden of proof	the duty to prove what you claim	The burden of proof is on the accuser.
to take the law into your own hands	to punish someone without the courts	Don't take the law into your own hands.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a rule at your school or work, using "set in stone" and "lay down the law".