Around 1754 BCE, King Hammurabi of Babylon ordered 282 laws carved into a seven-foot stele of black diorite and placed in the temple of Marduk for all to see. The code was not the first set of written laws — earlier Sumerian codes exist — but it is the most complete and best preserved legal document from the ancient world, and its influence echoes through every legal system that followed.
The laws cover everything from wages for ox drivers and surgeons to the punishment for accusing someone of murder without proof. They establish the principle of proportional justice — "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — though penalties varied sharply by social class. A free man who destroyed the eye of another free man lost his own eye; if the victim was a slave, the offender merely paid a fine.
What makes the code remarkable is not just its content but its public nature. Hammurabi positioned himself as a shepherd of justice, chosen by the gods to protect the weak from the strong. The stele's prologue and epilogue frame the laws as divine gifts, creating a template that lawmakers from Moses to Justinian would follow: law as covenant between ruler, people, and the divine.
The stele was looted by Elamite invaders around 1200 BCE and carried to Susa (in modern Iran), where French archaeologists discovered it in 1901. It now stands in the Louvre, a reminder that the human impulse to codify right and wrong, to carve justice into stone so it outlasts any king, is nearly as old as civilisation itself.
