A short while ago, I found a copy of the Law Code of Hammurabi, another milestone of sorts for my self-education endeavors because it’s the one everyone reads about in the survey courses (though few actually read it, most courses only mention it in passing). Also one of the amazing things that you can read for free. This copy was made available via www.thefederalistpapers.org, but I’m sure there are other places you can find one lying around if you put in the effort.
So Hammurabi was a king of Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BC, and during his reign he managed to control most of Mesopotamia. He seemed to have a particular interest in not just compensating victims with the law where damages were concerned, but he also seemed to have a pretty strong stance when it came to deterrence. As a result, one of the things his law code is particularly famous for is the brutal punishments for crimes committed. In that regard, Hammurabi pioneered the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’. There are some areas in his thinking that really weren’t that unreasonable, such as where inheritance law was concerned. But even so, he’s definitely a man of his time, and while there seem to have been allowances for innocent mistakes and for intent in the code, he seemed pretty keen on making sure that even if the people thought about committing crimes, they’d definitely know the consequences.
Things like if a builder built a house and it collapsed on the man who owned it, then his own life was forfeit. Or if someone was convicted of stealing they’d get their hand cut off. He didn’t seem to have much of a concept of limiting the punishment to those who had committed the crime, considering that there are laws in the code such as this one: If a man struck a free woman (of course, being during the time of Ancient Babylon there was a caste system, and slavery was a hard reality back then) who was carrying a child and the mother died as a result of the incident, then the man’s daughter would be put to death.
Clearly, there are some glaring issues here that Hammurabi seems to have overlooked (for instance, how in the heck is the guy hitting a woman somehow his poor daughter’s fault? Never mind what happens if our hypothetical perp does not have a daughter), but on the other hand, the concepts of human and civil rights and individual liberty are still a bit more than 3,000 years away from being invented.
Regardless, this is an important document, as it shows us how the concept of laws and crime have changed even since Enmetena and Urukagina. Definitely check it out if you have the time.
Break-Action Books 