Hammurabi

Life and ideas

Hammurabi ruled Babylon for over forty years and turned a city-state into the leading power of Mesopotamia. Late in his reign he had a long list of laws, with a prologue and an epilogue, carved on stone pillars (stelae) and set up where people could see them. The best-known copy, now in the Louvre, was found at Susa in 1901. The laws are mostly written as cases: if someone does this, this follows. They cover family, property, trade, wages, debt and injury, with penalties that depend on a person's rank. His prologue says the gods sent him to bring justice and to protect the weak from the strong. The code was not a statute book in the modern sense, and scholars still debate how closely courts followed it, but its public, written form made it the model of law as something that rulers publish and that people can read.