Their actions seem to have inspired the creation of the instrument for which
Hammurabi is so widely praised: the law code.
LAW CODESHammurabi’s laws rightly deserve the attention they receive. Recorded around 1760 BC
they show the most coherent and elaborate engagement with questions of justice in
early world history, unequalled so far as we know for more than a millennium. The
ancient Mesopotamians themselves realized their importance, copying passages from
Hammurabi’s text into the fifth century BC. Hammurabi was not a true innovator,
however. His laws include clauses King Dadusha from the kingdom of Eshnunna had
formulated a few decades earlier in the Babylonian language, and the form he used to
express the laws translated a paradigm in the Sumerian language, known from the
earlier laws of Ur-Namma (or his son Shulgi) of the twenty-first century Ur III period
and of Lipit-Eshtar (ruled 1934 – 1924 ) of the Isin dynasty. Ur-Namma’s laws were the
first to employ the casuistic format, for example: “If a man commits a murder, they
shall kill that man” (LU § 1 ). The format remained standard for expressing laws in
Mesopotamia and inspired the adjacent cultures of the biblical world and Greece. At
the time that Hammurabi used it in Babylonia, schools in his kingdom taught it in
Sumerian using the laws of Ur-Namma and Lipit-Eshtar as examples.
The purpose of this group of four early law codes is not obvious, nor does it have
to be exactly the same for each one of them. They were certainly not on a par with the
Code Napoléonor the like and do not feature as a source of reference and authority in
contemporary court documentation. The question has generated a large literature,
especially focused on Hammurabi’s text (Stol 2004 : 655 – 658 ). The law paragraphs
never appear alone; they are always preceded and followed by royal statements –
prologues and epilogues – that provide a temporal setting to the cases. The context is
quite clear in the case of Ur-Namma’s code – the only third millennium example – even
if the epilogue is lost. Issuing the code was part of his policy of protecting the weak in
society from abuse by the strong: “The orphan was not given up to the rich; the widow
was not given over to the powerful; the man who owns one shekel was not given over
to the man who owns one pound [i.e., 60 shekels]; the man who owns one sheep was
not given over to the man who owns one ox” (translation after Wilcke 2002 : 310 ). Ur-
Namma seems to identify specific abuses in a damaged and opaque passage: “At that
time, there was a nisKum-official[?] for canals; there was a chief-sailor for foreign
traders; there was someone who took oxen, someone who took sheep, and someone
who took donkeys for herdsmen” (translation after Wilcke 2002 : 306 ). The laws Ur-
Namma promulgated liberated these people from oppression by officials.
Ur-Namma’s actions place him in a sequence of rulers that started in Early Dynastic
Lagash – the first evidence comes from Enmetena around 2400 – and continued to the
end of the Old Babylonian period – Ammisaduqa of the seventeenth century is the
author of the latest known edict (see Renger 2002 for survey). The later edicts dealt
primarily with freeing people from oppressive debt burdens (Stol 2004 : 865 – 867 ); those
of the third millennium seem to focus on protecting them from abuse of power. The
most elaborate third millennium example is one of the earliest: the enigmatic state-
ments by Urukagina (alternative readings of the name are Uruinimgina and Irikagina),
often called his “Reforms.” Preserved on multiple clay cones and one clay plaque, they
–– Marc Van De Mieroop ––