Hammurabi’s Code

You can probably tell that Mesopotamia was not a very peaceful place to live. City-states fought each other. Powerful leaders tried to build empires by conquering other city-states.

Around 1792 BC/BCE, a king named Hammurabi inherited the throne of Babylon from his father. Babylon was a city near Kish (the home of Sargon). At first, Hammurabi only ruled a small area of the land around his own city. But soon he began to conquer some of the smaller cities around him. He convinced the kings of other cities to swear allegiance to him. Soon he ruled over the whole southern part of Mesopotamia. This area was called Babylonia, after the city of Babylon.

Hammurabi didn’t want people to obey him just because his army was strong. He wanted his empire to be governed by just laws. He believed that the chief god of Babylon, Marduk, made him king so that he could treat people fairly. In one of his letters, Hammurabi calls himself “the reverent god-fearing prince.” He says that his job as king is “to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the evil and the wicked so that the strong might not oppress the weak.”

Hammurabi wanted people to follow his laws because they were right, not just because soldiers were making them obey. He also wanted his whole empire to follow the same laws and rules. So Hammurabi wrote down all of the laws that he thought were fair. He had them carved in stone, on a monument that showed him getting the laws from the sun-god.

Here are some of the laws in the Code of Hammurabi. Do you think these are fair? Why or why not?

· If someone cuts down a tree on someone else’s land, he will pay for it.

· If someone is careless when watering his fields, and he floods someone else’s field by accident, he will pay for the grain he has ruined.

· If a man wants to throw his son out of the house, he has to go before a judge and say, “I don’t want my son to live in my house any more.” The judge will find out the reasons. If the reasons are not good, the man can’t throw his son out.

· If the son has done some great evil to his father, his father must forgive him the first time. But if he has done something evil twice, his father can throw him out.

· If a thief steals a cow, a sheep, a donkey, a pig, or a goat, he will pay ten times what it is worth. If he doesn’t have any money to pay with, he will be put to death.

· An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. If a man puts out the eye of another man, put his own eye out. If he knocks out another man’s tooth, knock out his own tooth. If he breaks another man’s bone, break his own bone.

· If a doctor operates on a patient and the patient dies, the doctor’s hand will be cut off.

· If a builder builds a house, and that house collapses and kills the owner, the builder will be put to death.

· If a robber is caught breaking a hole into a house so that he can get in and steal, he will be put to death in front of the hole.

Hammurabi was a very religious man. He believed that the gods themselves had given him the Code of Hammurabi. So he rebuilt many of the temples and ziggurats that had been destroyed in fights between city-states. He encouraged his people to sacrifice to the gods, and to learn more about them.

At that time, people in Babylon believed that they could find out what the gods were doing by watching the movements of the planets and stars. So they spent a lot of time studying the sky. They knew where all the constellations were. They knew the difference between stars and planets.

From watching the sky, the Babylonians were able to figure out that the earth goes all the way around the sun. They called the time that it took the earth to go all the way around the sun one time “one year.” Then they divided this year into twelve months. They were the first people to divide a year into twelve months, just like we do today.

The Babylonians were also the first to divide a day into twenty-four hours, and to divide an hour into sixty minutes. So whenever you look at a calendar to see what day of the month it is, or look at a clock to see what time it is, you’re using methods that we inherited from the Babylonians.