Code of Hammurabi

Hammurabi ruled Babylon from about 1792 to 1750 BCE, according to the chronology commonly used in modern reference works. Toward the end of his reign, legal decisions associated with his rule were gathered and inscribed on a large stone stele, probably around 1750 BCE. The monument was set up in Babylon's temple of Marduk, the city's chief god. Its text preserves 282 judgments arranged as cases rather than a modern, exhaustive statute book. Earlier Mesopotamian law collections existed: the Code of Ur-Nammu, for example, predates Hammurabi by several centuries.

Many rulings use a conditional pattern: they describe a situation and then state a remedy or penalty. The judgments address family relations, property, trade, labor and other parts of social and economic life in early second-millennium BCE Babylonia. Penalties could depend on the social status of the people involved and on the circumstances of a case, so the text does not express a modern principle of equal treatment. The famous rule often summarized as “an eye for an eye” is one specific ruling among many; in its context it sets a proportionate response to a particular injury rather than describing the whole collection.

A carved scene at the top of the stele shows Hammurabi before Shamash, the sun god associated with justice. The image and the inscription present justice as a royal duty grounded in divine authority. The text's prologue and epilogue frame the rulings as part of Hammurabi's account of his kingship, not simply as a neutral handbook for judges. Yale Assyriologist Kathryn E. Slanski has argued that the monument's words and imagery also served a public and commemorative purpose: they made a visible claim about the king's commitment to just rule. What the stele meant to different audiences, and how directly its judgments were applied in individual cases, remain matters for historical interpretation.

Centuries after it was made, the stele was taken from Babylonia to Susa, in present-day Iran, as war booty by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte. French excavations found it at Susa at the beginning of the 20th century. Sources differ on the exact year of discovery: the Louvre gives 1902, while Britannica and other histories give 1901. The Louvre has displayed the stele since 1904. Because it preserves a substantial collection of legal judgments alongside royal imagery, it remains a central source for studying Babylonian law and ideas about kingship—not proof that its rules were the first laws or the only laws used in daily life.