How Did Hammurabi Organize the Laws of Babylon
Unlike the prologue, the 500-line epilogue explicitly refers to laws. [63] The epilogue begins (3144`–3151`): “These are the right decisions that Hammurabi has. (Dīnāt mīšarim ša ḫammurabi. ukinnu-ma). He glorifies His laws and generosity (3152`–3239`). [65] He then expresses the hope that “every unjust man who has a complaint” (awīlum ḫablum ša awātam iraššû) can have the laws of the stele read to him and know his rights (3240`–3256`). [66] This would bring praise (3257`–3275`) and divine favor (3276`–3295`) to Hammurabi. [67] Hammurabi wished good luck to any leader who listened to his statements and respected his stele (3296`–3359`). [68] However, he invokes the wrath of the gods on anyone who disobeys his statements or erases them (3360`-3641`, the end of the text).
[69] [Note 1] However, the arguments against this view are strong. First, it would result in a very unusual code – Reuven Yaron called the term “code” a “persistent misnomer.” [95] Important sectors of society and commerce are left out. [96] Marc Van De Mieroop, for example, notes that the Code “deals with livestock and agricultural fields, but almost completely ignores the work of herders, which is vital to the economy of Babylon.” [97] Second, contrary to legislative theory, highly implausible circumstances are generally recorded, such as threshing with goats, animals that are far too unruly for this task (Bill 270). [98] The laws are also strictly casuistic (“si. then”); Unlike the Mosaic law, there are no apodictic laws (general commandments). These would more clearly indicate a prescriptive law. The strongest argument against the legislative theory, however, is that most judges seem to have ignored the code. This criticism comes from Benno Landsberger in 1950. [87] No Mesopotamian legal document makes explicit reference to the Code or any other statute book,[92] despite the large size of the corpus.
[99] Two references to recipes on “a stele” (narû)[100] come closest to each other. On the other hand, many judgments cite royal decrees of mīšarum. [92] Raymond Westbrook argued that this reinforced the silence argument that the ancient legal codes of the Middle East had legal significance. [101] Moreover, many ancient Babylonian judgments completely contradict the provisions of the Codex. [102] The top of the stele shows an image of Hammurabi with Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice. Under the relief are about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text: a fifth contains a poetic-style prologue and epilogue, while the remaining four-fifths contain what are commonly referred to as laws. In the prologue, Hammurabi claims that the gods granted him his reign “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.” Laws are casuistic, expressed as “if. and then “conditional sentences.” Its scope is broad and includes, for example, criminal law, family law, property law and commercial law. According to his own inscriptions, letters and administrative documents of his reign, he tried to improve the lives of those who lived under his rule. As mentioned earlier, it is best known in modern times for its law, which is often cited as the first in history, although it is not. There were earlier codes in Mesopotamia, but Hammurabis was the clearest and most comprehensive, thus serving as a model for other cultures, including the laws established by Hebrew writers in the Bible. Wolfram von Soden, who decades earlier called this way of thinking enumerating science,[119] often denigrated it.
[120] However, recent authors such as Marc Van De Mieroop, Jean Bottero and Ann Guinan have either avoided value judgments or expressed admiration. Lists were at the heart of Mesopotamian science and logic, and their strong structural principles made it possible to generate endless entries. [118] The connection between the codex and the writing tradition in which the “science of lists” was born also explains why aspiring writers have copied and studied it for more than a millennium. [24] The codex appears at the end of the Babylonian (7th-6th century BC). List of literary and scientific texts. [121] No other body of law has been so firmly anchored in the curriculum. [122] Instead of a legal code, it can therefore be a scientific treatise. [100] The Code of Hammurabi, engraved on a large stone stele – a vertical plate – was discovered by a French expedition in 1901. Its director, Father Vincent Scheil, translated the codex the following year.
At the time, it was the oldest known set of laws that seemed to be. Since then, however, similar “codes” have been discovered. Although the code of Hammurabi is not unique, it remains the longest code discovered to date, and one of the few known to have been inscribed on a stele. Information and an image of the stele can be found at the Louvre Museum, which is available via the resource revised by EDSITEment The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago. On the Louvre website, click on the “selected works” link on the left. Then click on Oriental Antiquities; under “selected works,” click on Mesopotamia and Anatolia; And finally, you will see an image of the stele as you scroll through the thumbnails. It is marked as the “Code of Hammurabi`s Law”. You can directly access information about the stele, which also comes from the Louvre. It was not until the advent of Assur-bani-pal and Samas-sum-yukin that we find that the Babylonians invoked the laws of their city, that groups of foreigners up to the same number of twenty could freely enter the city, that foreign women who were once married to Babylonian husbands could not be enslaved, and that not even a dog entering the city.
could be killed without trial. But the 282-law system was just one of the achievements of a ruler who transformed Babylon, a city-state 60 miles south of present-day Baghdad, into the dominant power of ancient Mesopotamia. The stele was packed and shipped to the Louvre in Paris, and in less than a year it was translated and widely published as the first example of a written code of law – one that was older but had striking parallels with the laws of the Hebrew Old Testament. Traités en général: Oppert et Menant, Documents juridiques de l`Assyrie et de la Chaldee (Paris, 1877); J. Kohler and F. E. Peiser, Aus dem Babylonischen Rechtsleben (Leipzig, 1890 ff.); F. E. Peiser, Babylonische vertrage (Berlin, 1890), Keilinschrifiliche Actenstucke (Berlin, 1889); Fr.
Meissner, Beiträgee zur altbabylonischen Privatrecht (Leipzig, 1893); F. E. Peiser, “Texte und geschaftlichen Inhalts,” Bd. von Schraders Keilinschriften Bibliothek (Berlin, 1896); C. H. W. Johns, Assyrian Deeds and Documents relating to the Transfer of Property (3 vols., Cambridge, 1898); H. Radau, Early Babylonian History (New York, 1900); C. H.
W. Johns, Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters (Edinburgh, 1904). In addition to carving his laws in stone, “there are many other aspects of this king`s achievements,” writes Marc Van De Mieroop, a history professor at Columbia University, in his 2005 book King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography. “He was a leader, warrior, diplomat and administrator.” As the ancient churches grew, they needed a stronger central government to carry out and take charge of necessary public projects—such as the canals that allowed Babylon to grow surplus food—and to maintain law and order in order to keep life in the cities running smoothly. We know from records on clay tablets that Babylonia had an organized justice system. Such a system requires some standardization of the law, as well as an educated class that serves as judges and clerks. Law 238 states that a master, ship manager or charterer who has saved a ship from total loss is only required to pay half of the value of the ship to the shipowner. [175] [176] [177] In the Digesta seu Pandectae (533), the second volume of the codification of laws ordered by Justinian I (527-565) of the Eastern Roman Empire, a legal opinion of the Roman jurist Paul at the beginning of the crisis of the third century in 235 AD on the Lex Rhodia (“Rhodian law”) has been included, which articulates the general principle of the average of maritime insurance. on the island of Rhodes around 1000 to 800 BC. As a member of the Doric hexapolis, plausible by the Phoenicians during the planned Doric invasion and emergence of the so-called Sea Peoples in the Greek Middle Ages (c. 1100 – c.
750), which led to the spread of the Doric-Greek dialect. [178] [179] [180] The law of the general average is the basic principle underlying all insurance. [179] Persons were not equal before the law; Not only age and occupation, but also class and gender dictated the punishment or remedy they received.