The Code of Hammurabi: The World’s First Written Laws

The phrase “an eye for an eye” comes from the Code of Hammurabi. So does the concept of legal presumption of innocence, the idea of a minimum wage, and the world’s first known rules against medical malpractice. When you look at what Hammurabi actually wrote in 1754 BC, most of the surprises are how modern it feels.

Here is what the Code actually says, why it mattered, and where you can still see the seven-foot basalt stele it was carved into. For context see our Babylon post.

Who Hammurabi was

Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigning from about 1792 to 1750 BC. He inherited a small city-state and, over 42 years, built it into an empire that controlled all of southern Mesopotamia. His empire fell apart within a generation of his death, but the law code he issued in about the 30th year of his reign outlived Babylon itself.

He was not the first Mesopotamian ruler to issue a law code. The earlier codes of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BC) and Lipit-Ishtar (c. 1930 BC) survive in fragments. Hammurabi’s code was much longer, more comprehensive, and — crucially — was preserved almost complete because it was carved into a stone stele that survived being carted off as war loot 600 years later.

What the Code actually contains

The Code has 282 numbered laws (a few are damaged and missing), covering:

• False accusation and perjury
• Theft and receipt of stolen property
• Robbery, kidnapping and murder
• Property crime and boundary disputes
• Contracts, loans and debt
• Marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption
• Sexual assault and adultery
• Assault, injury and homicide
• Professional liability — doctors, veterinarians, builders, boatmen
• Slave law
• Wages, prices and rentals

The prologue and epilogue are religious — Hammurabi presents himself as chosen by the gods to bring justice. The core is entirely practical.

“An eye for an eye”

The most famous provision is Law 196: “If a man puts out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.” This is lex talionis — the law of equivalent retaliation. Modern readers often see it as barbaric, but its purpose was actually to limit retaliation, not to permit it. Before written law, injury could trigger open-ended blood feuds; the Code says the maximum punishment matches the offence exactly, no more.

The rule is also class-based. Eye-for-eye applies between men of the same social class. If a nobleman injures a commoner, the punishment is a fine (Law 198). If he injures a slave, it’s half the slave’s market value (Law 199). Egalitarianism is not the goal; predictability is.

The first minimum wage

Laws 257-274 set standardised wages for different occupations:

• Field labourer — 8 gur (about 2,400 litres) of grain per year
• Ox driver — 6 gur per year
• Herdsman — 8 gur per year, plus responsibility for lost animals
• Boatman renting a boat — 3 gur per year
• Carpenter, weaver, tailor, bronze-smith — 5 grains of silver per day

These are not maximums or minimums separately — they are set rates. Hammurabi wanted a predictable economy. The Code also sets fixed prices for grain, oil and wool, and fixed interest rates on loans (20% per year on silver, 33% on grain).

Professional liability

Some of the most striking laws in the Code deal with what we would now call malpractice. Law 218: “If a physician makes a large incision with an operating knife and kills the patient, or opens a tumour and destroys the eye, his hands shall be cut off.” Law 229: “If a builder builds a house and does not construct it properly, and the house he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”

Modern readers wince, but the underlying principle is legally significant: professionals are accountable for their work, and negligence has real consequences. It is nearly 4,000 years before the modern concept of tort liability appears in Western law.

Women in the Code

The Code treats women as legal persons with property and inheritance rights, though not as equals of men. Women could own land, run businesses, initiate divorce (though only under specific circumstances), and inherit from their fathers. A woman abandoned by her husband kept the household property; a woman divorced without cause got her dowry back.

Adultery is punished by drowning both parties, unless the husband forgives his wife (in which case the king must also forgive the man). The code protects wives against unfounded accusations: Law 131 requires evidence for adultery accusations, and Law 132 lets an accused wife clear herself by swearing an oath.

The stele

The Code was inscribed on a 2.25-metre basalt stele — a tapered upright slab — topped by a relief of Hammurabi standing before the sun god Shamash, receiving the laws. Copies of the text were also written on clay tablets and distributed across the empire; some of these survive in fragments.

The main stele stood in Babylon’s Esagila temple until around 1150 BC, when the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte sacked Babylon and hauled it back to his capital Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran) as war loot. He carved out about seven columns of the text to inscribe his own name, but died before finishing the job.

The stele stayed at Susa, mostly forgotten, for 3,000 years. In 1901 a French expedition led by Jacques de Morgan found it during excavations at Susa. It was shipped to the Louvre in Paris, where it has been on display ever since.

Where to see it today

• Louvre, Paris — the original stele, in the Near East wing (Room 227). Free of charge on the first Sunday of each month.
• Iraq Museum, Baghdad — cuneiform copies of the Code on clay tablets, plus other Old Babylonian legal texts
• Babylon itself — the modern site does not have any original Code fragments, but the layout of the Esagila temple where the stele stood is visible

The Code has been continuously translated since Jean-Vincent Scheil published the first French translation in 1902. Full English translations are freely available online through the Yale Avalon Project.

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