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Impressed in a diorite stele more than two meters high, the Hammurabi Code was found by a French archaeologist team in Susa, in Iraq, in 1902. The stone, broken in three parts, is now remade and served at Louvre Museum in Paris.
The divine origin of the written law is stressed by a bas-relief where Hammurabi is pictured while receiving the code by the Sun god, Shamash, who in Babylon was the justice symbol. The code is written on three orizontal columns of cuneiform writing: 16 columns in one side of the stele and 28 in the other one. Divided in 28 paragraphs, it starts with the discipline and the lawsuit, then there are the laws about the property, the loan, the deposit, the obligations, the domestic property and the family right. In the part about damns to people there are penalities for the doctors' mistakes during the operations, and for the damn caused by negligence during commercial exchanges; in the code are also the tariffs for all commercial services. It finishes with the celebration of great peace works done by Hammurabi who was called for by the gods "to destroy the evil's forces and to make the justice win on the earth".
Hammurabi code, which doesn't contain laws about religion and where, like the Semitic right "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", the penal right is founded on the law of retaliation, offered protection to the weakest Babylonian social class (women, children). Regarding the time when it was written, it's the symbol of a very advanced society.
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