Hammurabi

• 1. Introduction

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  Hammurabi was the sixth Amorite king of Babylon, and he ruled a city that almost nobody expected to matter. When he inherited the throne around 1792 BC from his father Sin-Muballit, who abdicated because of failing health, Babylon was a minor kingdom hemmed in by older and stronger neighbors. Yet within a few decades, one man brought nearly all of Mesopotamia under a single ruler.

  He is remembered today for a stone covered in 282 laws, carved in Akkadian and crowned with an image of a god handing down justice. But the law code is only one thread of his story. How did a king of a small city-state ridden over by powerful rivals come to be declared a god in his own lifetime? Why did kings across the Near East, centuries after his death, claim him as an ancestor? And what made a German lecture in 1902 turn his name into the center of a furious argument about the Bible?

• 2. A Minor Kingdom Hemmed In

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  Babylon was founded around 1894 BC as a relatively minor city-state that controlled little territory beyond its own walls. For a century or so it was overshadowed by older and more powerful kingdoms, among them Elam, Assyria, Isin, Eshnunna, and Larsa. The central and southern Mesopotamian plains were dotted with largely Amorite-ruled city-states, all of them waging war on one another for control of fertile agricultural land.

  Sin-Muballit, Hammurabi's father, had already begun to change that. He consolidated a small area of south central Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule and conquered the minor city-states of Borsippa, Kish, and Sippar. The geopolitical map he passed down was crowded and dangerous. Eshnunna controlled the upper Tigris River, while Larsa held the river delta to the south.

  Elam lay to the east of Mesopotamia, a powerful kingdom that regularly invaded and forced tribute upon the small southern states. In the north, the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I had inherited centuries-old Assyrian colonies in Anatolia and pushed his territory into the Levant and central Mesopotamia. His untimely death would somewhat fragment that kingdom, opening a door for an ambitious ruler to the south.

• 3. Uniting Mesopotamia

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  The first few years of Hammurabi's reign were quite peaceful, and he spent them on public works rather than war. He heightened the city walls for defensive purposes and expanded the temples of Babylon. That quiet ended when Elam, straddling important trade routes across the Zagros Mountains, swept down onto the Mesopotamian plain, attacked the kingdom of Eshnunna, destroyed a number of cities, and imposed its rule on parts of the plain.

  Elam then tried to provoke a war between Babylon and the kingdom of Larsa. Hammurabi and Rim-Sin I, the king of Larsa, discovered the duplicity and allied to crush the Elamites, though Larsa never actually sent soldiers to fight. Angered by that failure, Hammurabi invaded and annexed Larsa, gaining control of the entire lower Mesopotamian plain around 1763 BC.

  Mari and Yamhad had helped Hammurabi in the south, and the absence of their soldiers in the north stirred unrest there. He turned northward, quelled the trouble, and destroyed Eshnunna. His armies then conquered the remaining northern states, including his former ally Mari, though that conquest may have been a surrender without any actual fighting.

  Hammurabi entered a protracted war with Ishme-Dagan I of Assyria, each king making alliances with minor states to gain the upper hand. He prevailed, ousting Ishme-Dagan I just before his own death and forcing Mut-Ashkur to pay tribute. Only Yamhad and Qatna in the western Levant kept their independence, while a stele found as far north as Diyarbakir records his claim to the title King of the Amorites.

• 4. A Stone Covered In Laws

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  The Code of Hammurabi gathered 282 laws addressing a wide range of issues, and it broke sharply from what came before. Earlier Sumerian codes, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, focused on compensating the victim of a crime. Hammurabi's code instead emphasized physically punishing the perpetrator, with each offense receiving a specified punishment. Many offenses resulted in death, disfigurement, or the Lex Talionis philosophy of eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

  The code was among the first to establish the presumption of innocence, suggesting that accused and accuser each have the opportunity to provide evidence. It also placed restrictions on what a wronged person was permitted to do in retribution. Written by scribes on 12 tablets, the laws were inscribed on a stele and placed in a public place so that all could see, even though few people were literate.

  Hammurabi wrote the code in Akkadian, the daily language of Babylon, so any literate person in the city could read it. At this time Akkadian was replacing Sumerian, and Hammurabi began language reforms that pushed Akkadian into wider use. A carving at the top of the stele shows him receiving the laws from Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice, and the preface states that Shamash chose him to bring the laws to the people.

  According to one journal, his laws were more humane than those of other kings of his era. He set minimum wages for ordinary workers, and the same journal notes he ruled that seasonal workers should be paid at a higher rate than year-round workers. The stele itself would later travel far from Babylon, plundered by the Elamites and carried to their capital at Susa.

• 5. A King Declared A God

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  Hammurabi was honored above all other kings of the second millennium BC and received the unique distinction of being declared a god within his own lifetime. The personal name Hammurabi-ili, meaning Hammurabi is my god, became common during and after his reign. In writings shortly after his death he was commemorated for three achievements: bringing victory in war, bringing peace, and bringing justice.

  His conquests came to be regarded as part of a sacred mission to spread civilization to all nations. A stele from Ur glorifies him in his own voice as a ruler who forces evil into submission and compels all peoples to worship Marduk. It declares: "The people of Elam, Gutium, Subartu, and Tukrish, whose mountains are distant and whose languages are obscure, I placed into Marduk's hand. I myself continued to put straight their confused minds."

  A later hymn, also written in his own voice, extols him as a supernatural force for Marduk, calling himself the great dragon among kings, the net stretched over the enemy, and the young lion who breaks nets and scepters. After praising his military feats, the hymn ends by declaring: "I am Hammurabi, the king of justice." Over time, that role as lawgiver came to be emphasized above all his conquests.

  His reign became the point of reference for all events in the distant past. A hymn to the goddess Ishtar, written during the reign of Ammi-Saduqa, his fourth successor, names Hammurabi as the king who first heard the song and wishes him life forever. For centuries scribes kept copying his laws as writing exercises, and they were even partially translated into Sumerian.

• 6. How An Empire Unravels

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  Hammurabi died around 1750 BC and was succeeded by his son Samsu-iluna, under whose rule the kingdom quickly began to unravel. Vast numbers of contract tablets survive from these reigns, along with 55 of Hammurabi's own letters. Those letters reveal the daily trials of ruling: dealing with floods, mandating changes to a flawed calendar, and caring for Babylon's massive herds of livestock.

  The short-lived Babylonian Empire collapsed in stages. Around 1740 BC, both Amorites and Babylonians were driven from Assyria by Puzur-Sin, a native Akkadian-speaking ruler. At roughly the same time, native Akkadian speakers in the far south threw off Amorite Babylonian rule and created the Sealand Dynasty in the region of ancient Sumer.

  Hammurabi's ineffectual successors lost territory to Assyrian kings such as Adasi and Bel-ibni, to the Sealand Dynasty, to Elam, and to the Kassites from the northeast. The final blow came in 1595 BC, when Babylon was sacked by the powerful Hittite Empire, ending all Amorite political presence in Mesopotamia. The Hittites did not stay, instead turning Babylon over to their Kassite allies.

  The Kassite Dynasty ruled Babylon for over 400 years and adopted much of its culture, including Hammurabi's code of laws. His memory outlasted his empire. When the Elamite king Shutruk-Nakhunte raided Babylon in 1158 BC and carried off many stone monuments, he erased most of their inscriptions, yet on the stele of Hammurabi's laws only four or five columns were wiped out and no new inscription was ever added.

• 7. Rediscovery And The Bible Debate

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  Archaeologists rediscovered Hammurabi in the late 19th century, and his stele was found at Susa in Iran in 1901, where it now stands in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The find arrived in the middle of the Babel und Bibel controversy in Germany, a heated argument over the relationship between the Bible and ancient Babylonian texts. The Code of Hammurabi became a major center of that debate.

  In January 1902, the German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch lectured at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin before Kaiser Wilhelm II and his wife, arguing that the Mosaic Laws of the Old Testament were directly copied from the Code of Hammurabi. The reaction was enormous. By September 1903, Delitzsch had collected 1,350 short newspaper and journal articles, over 300 longer ones, and twenty-eight pamphlets written in response to this lecture and a preceding one about the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  The articles were overwhelmingly critical, and the Kaiser distanced himself from Delitzsch's radical views. By the fall of 1904, Delitzsch was forced to give his third lecture in Cologne and Frankfurt am Main rather than in Berlin. His argument hardened in his 1920-21 book Die grosse Tauschung, in which he claimed the Hebrew Bible was irredeemably contaminated by Babylonian influence.

  Many scholars in the early twentieth century believed Hammurabi was Amraphel, the King of Shinar in Genesis 14:1, a view now largely rejected. Most conclude the Mosaic laws were not directly inspired by his code, since fragments of earlier law codes exist. Yet the connection has not gone away. In 2010, a team from Hebrew University found a cuneiform tablet at Hazor in Israel, dating to the eighteenth or seventeenth century BC, containing laws clearly derived from the Code of Hammurabi.

• 8. The Lawgiver In Marble

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  Hammurabi's reputation as a lawgiver carved his image into buildings he never could have imagined. He is one of the 23 lawgivers depicted in marble bas-reliefs in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives in the United States Capitol. A frieze by Adolph Weinman portraying the great lawgivers of history, Hammurabi among them, sits on the south wall of the U.S. Supreme Court building.

  The Code of Hammurabi and the Law of Moses in the Torah contain numerous similarities, and that resemblance has kept his name alive in courtrooms and scholarship alike. His family thread also reaches across the centuries through claims of descent. Over a thousand years after his death, the kings of Suhum, a land along the Euphrates River just northwest of Babylon, claimed him as their ancestor. A Neo-Babylonian royal inscription, meant for display on a stele, even commemorates a grant of tax exemptions to nine Babylonian cities while presenting its royal protagonist as a second Hammurabi.