Hammurabi Code: basic laws, description and history. The Code of Laws of King Hammurabi

Since time immemorial, human society has sought to regulate the behavior of its citizens, their rights and responsibilities, social status and status. The oldest surviving code of laws is the Hammurabi Code, compiled 4 thousand years ago. This legal document, which has no analogues in such a remote past, still affects researchers.

Unique find

The Hammurabi code of laws was found at the very beginning of the 20th century on the territory of modern Iran.

In 1901 a group of archaeologists from France, under the leadership of Jacques de Morgan, conducted excavations on Susa. There in the days of Ancient Mesopotamia was the state of Elam - the rival of ancient Babylon.

This expedition found three fragments of a basalt column with a height of just over 2 meters. When they were connected, it became clear that this is a unique find. At the top of the stele was an image of a king or ruler addressing the god Shamash, who was holding something similar to a scroll. Below the figure and on the back of the stele were lines of cuneiform signs.

Probably, the warlike Elamites in one of their raids took a stele from Babylon and brought to Elam. Invaders, most likely, and broke it, after scraping the first lines of the inscription.

The basalt column was transported to the Louvre, where the inscription on it was deciphered and translated by the professor of Assyriology J.-V. Sheil. This was the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, containing a detailed set of laws. Later, the destroyed articles were restored on the basis of records on clay tablets, including from the library of Ashurbanipal, found in ancient Nineveh.

Babylon for 18 centuries before the birth of Christ

The collection of Hammurabi laws can be called the pinnacle of lawmaking of ancient civilizations. It was created in the heyday of the Babylonian kingdom in the eighteenth century BC. E. It was a perfect state for those times with a strong, though limited, royal power. Considered a servant of the supreme deity, the king ruled on the basis of priests, and his actions, as well as the behavior of any other inhabitant of Babylon, were regulated by laws. This reflects the Hammurabi Code, whose articles are devoted to the rights and duties of citizens.

The basis of the economy of Ancient Babylon was agriculture, and the duty of the ruler was to control the condition of the fields, especially since most of the land belonged to the state.

The developed system of bureaucrats allowed successfully solving the most complicated problems of state administration, and the standing army defended not only the external borders, but also the internal order and power of the tsar.

Hammurabi - commander and statesman

Coming to power at a young age, Hammurabi showed himself as an outstanding organizer, commander and diplomat. During his more than thirty years of government, he systematically solved three main tasks.

• The unification of the disparate and hostile states of Mesopotamia under their authority.
• The development of agriculture on the basis of a powerful irrigation system.
• Establishment and maintenance of fair laws, which are embodied in the Code of Hammurabi.

And we should pay tribute to this outstanding ruler: he not only successfully coped with the tasks set, but also became famous for his code.

The Hammurabi Code. general characteristics

Judging by the first lines of the cuneiform text, the main goal of creating the code is to establish universal justice. The main guarantor of this and the source of all blessings was the king.

The main part of the code is the articles of laws, there are several hundred of them in the arch. Despite the appeal to the gods in the introduction, the articles themselves have no connection with the religious aspects of the life of people of that time, but concern exclusively legal issues.

At the conclusion of this document, the tsar lists his services to the country and the gods in a pompous manner at that time and calls on the gods to punish the heads of those who violate the law.

Characteristics of the code of King Hammurabi can be given both from a legal and historical point of view.

The result of the legislative activity of Hammurabi

As a legal document, the code of King Hammurabi is a set of rules that regulate the conduct of citizens of the state in a wide range of spheres: political, economic, family, household, etc. That is, the articles of the code refer both to criminal and civil law, Although in Ancient Babylon, these very concepts were not yet there.

The norms of the code of laws are largely based on customary law, ancient traditions and old Sumerian legislation. But Hammurabi supplemented the code with his vision of legal relations.

The full cuneiform text, embossed on the stele, the researchers divided into paragraphs or articles that can be grouped by subject:

• Articles relating to property relations: inheritance rights, economic obligations to the tsar and the state;
• family law;
• Articles related to criminal offenses: murder, self-mutilation, theft.

However, the very first "section" of the code describes measures aimed at preventing arbitrariness in courts, and rules regulating the behavior of judges. This distinguishes the laws of Hammurabi from other ancient forensics.

Property law

Articles relating to this area are aimed at protecting property rights, with priority given to state property and the property of the tsar. The ruler also had the exclusive right to dispose of all the land in the state, and the communities paid a tax for the use of land to the treasury.

The regulation of tenure rights, including those received for service, and the conditions for renting property in the code is given great attention. The rules for the use of irrigation facilities and the punishment for damage caused to them are described. The Code also envisaged a penalty for an unfair trade deal, assistance to a runaway slave, spoiling someone else's property, etc.

It should be noted that the Hammurabi Code contained many articles that were quite progressive for that time. For example, in it the time of debt slavery was limited to three years, regardless of the size of the debt.

Family law

Family relations, as follows from the code, had a patriarchal character: the wife and children were obliged to obey the master of the house, according to the law a man could have several wives and adopt children of slaves. His wife and children were in fact the property of a man. The father could deprive the sons of the inheritance.

The woman, however, was not really deprived of rights. If the husband rudely treated her, without evidence accused of treason, the wife had the right to return to her parents, taking the dowry. She could own her property and in some cases make deals.

At the time of marriage, a marriage contract was concluded, which stipulated the rights of the wife, including property.

Punishment for crimes against life and health of citizens

Penalties for the criminal offenses described in the code are brutal - the most common punishment was the death penalty. And mostly the articles of criminal law relied on the principle of the talion circulated in ancient times , according to which the punishment should be similar (equivalent) to the committed crime.

This logical, from the point of view of the consciousness of the ancient man, the principle was often brought to the point of absurdity. So, in one of the articles of the code it is written that if a builder built a fragile house and as a result of his collapse the son of the owner of the house died, then it is necessary to kill the child of the builder.

Sometimes corporal punishment could be replaced by a fine, especially if it was about harming a slave.

Special judges of the Society of Ancient Babylon did not know, and the settlement of relations between citizens and the determination of the penalty for crimes involved administrative officials and eminent people of the city. The supreme judge, whose verdict was not in dispute, was the king himself.

In the time of Hammurabi there were also temple courts, but they did not play a significant role in the proceedings and only took oaths before the statue of the deity in the temple.

The laws of Hammurabi as a historical document

The Hammurabi Code is a unique source for studying not only the history of law, but also political life, everyday life and material culture of people who lived in the territory of Mesopotamia for 2 thousand years before the birth of Christ.

A lot of nuances and features of life in ancient Babylon became known only thanks to this collection of laws. Thus, from the Hammurabi Code, historians have learned that, in addition to free and full-fledged community members and rightsless slaves, there were still "mushkenums" in Babylonian society. These are partially disenfranchised poor people, serving the tsar or the state, for example, in the construction of canals.

Agriculture and domestic politics, craft and health, the system of education and family-marriage relations are all reflected in the Hammurabi code of laws.