After the fall of Ur, power in southern Mesopotamia splintered again. Rival kingdoms rose at Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna, Mari and elsewhere, many of them ruled by dynasties with Amorite names. The Amorites were Semitic-speaking newcomers who founded new dynasties across Mesopotamia and Syria. One of these dynasties held a modest town on the Euphrates called Babylon.

Hammurabi the king

Hammurabi, sixth king of that dynasty, ruled from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. For most of his reign Babylon was one power among several, and he played a long game of alliances. A letter from the archives of Mari observed that no king was strong on his own: ten or fifteen kings followed Hammurabi, as many followed the king of Larsa, and so on. In his last decade he struck. He conquered Larsa in about 1763 BCE, then Eshnunna and Mari, and united most of Mesopotamia under Babylon.

The stele and its laws

Near the end of his reign Hammurabi set up stone monuments inscribed with nearly three hundred laws, framed by a long prologue and epilogue. The best preserved is a black stone pillar over two meters tall, now in the Louvre. It was not found in Babylon. Around 1158 BCE an Elamite king raided Mesopotamia and hauled it home as a trophy. Hammurabi's stele was found at Susa in Iran, where Elamites had carried it, by French excavators in 1901 to 1902.

In the prologue Hammurabi says the gods called him to make justice visible in the land, to destroy the wicked and to keep the strong from oppressing the weak. The epilogue invites any wronged man to come before the statue, have the stele read to him and find his case. Most of Hammurabi's laws were written as cases: if someone does this, then that follows. For example, if a man brings a charge of murder against another and cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death.

Status, debt and women

The laws did not treat everyone alike. They name three broad ranks: the awilum, a free person of full standing; the mushkenum, a commoner who may have depended on the palace; and the wardum, a slave. In Hammurabi's laws, punishments varied by the victim's social class. Harming an awilum could bring physical punishment, while the same harm to a commoner was usually paid for in silver, and harm to a slave was paid to the slave's owner.

Debt was a constant danger. A family in trouble might hand over a wife, son or daughter to work off what it owed. The laws limited debt bondage so that family members served at most three years, after which they went free. Kings also acted more broadly. A misharum edict was a royal order cancelling certain debts, usually issued when a new king took the throne, to keep debt from turning free farmers into permanent dependents.

Women appear often. A wife brought a dowry that remained hers and passed to her children. A wife whose husband neglected or publicly shamed her could, in some cases, leave and take her dowry, though the same laws punished an unfaithful wife harshly. In the city of Sippar lived the naditu. The naditu of Sippar were women dedicated to the sun god who managed their own property, buying land, lending silver and appearing in contracts by name.

Code or monument?

It is natural to call the stele a law code, as if judges looked up cases in it. Many scholars doubt that. Thousands of court records and contracts survive from Hammurabi's time and after. Many scholars doubt the stele was a code in the modern sense because court records almost never cite it. Some laws look like scholarly exercises, working through variations of a case the way omen and medical texts did. Others suggest the stele was mainly royal self-presentation, proof to gods and people that Hammurabi was a just king. Still, its ideas clearly reflect real legal practice, and scribes copied it for more than a thousand years. Babylon's dynasty itself fell in 1595 BCE, when a Hittite army sacked the city, and a people called the Kassites then ruled Babylonia for about four centuries.

Worked example: When a house falls down

Several of Hammurabi's laws deal with builders. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make it sound, and it collapses and kills the owner, the builder shall be put to death. If it kills the owner's son, the builder's son shall be put to death. If it kills a slave, the builder gives a slave of equal value. If property is destroyed, he replaces it and rebuilds the house at his own cost.

Look at what these laws assume. Professionals are responsible for the safety of their work, an idea modern building codes share. Penalties follow the status of the victim. And in the second case, a son who did nothing wrong dies for his father's fault, because the law treats children partly as extensions of the head of the household. A modern reader can respect the stele's aim of protecting the weak while noticing how far it is from the principle that each person answers only for their own acts and has worth in their own right.