CHAPTER 6 – THE LAWS OF HAMMURABI
The Text
The following tablets represent copies made of a series of laws bookended by a poetic
prologue and epilogue that stem from the Old Babylonian period, specifically to the rule
of Hammurabi of Babylon. The composition is generally dated to the first half of the 18th
century B.C.E. The prologue, epilogue and intervening laws were inscribed on a piece of
diorite that stands approximately 225 centimetres tall, the upper portion of which is taken
up by a depiction of the king standing before a seated deity, presumed to be Šamaš. The
text descends in horizontal bands down the front side and then the back side of the stele,
increasing in length as the stele increases in girth towards its base. As can be determined
from the ancient fragments these Laws existed in more than one copy from an early
point.^335 The use of the Louvre stele (LH) as the Haupttext in the present study is due
primarily to its relatively complete preservation, especially when compared to the other
sources. Only seven columns of the lower portion of the front side of the stele have been
effaced.
(^335) The primary exemplar of the Laws, used here as the (^) Haupttext, is the black basalt stele discovered by
Scheil at Susa in 1901-2, now kept at the Louvre in Paris. In addition to this monument there exist frag-
ments, also inscribed on black basalt, that are presumed to have belonged to another stele that bore the
same inscription, for which see the description in G.R. Driver and J.C. Miles, The Babylonian Laws (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1955) 29-30. Based on this and other fragments J. Nougayrol, "Les Fragments en
Pierre du Code Hammourabien (II)," Journal Asiatique 246, 2 (1958) 150, concluded that there were in fact
three copies of the stele at Susa.