Counting Hammurabi's Laws: What a Code Covered

Law Day at the Ridgeline County Law Library

1Every May 1, Law Day, the Ridgeline County Law Library invites visitors to look at its shelves. They hold the county code: thousands of rules about traffic, building permits, business licenses and more. Anyone may walk in and read them, and county officials must follow them too. The idea that laws should be written, public and binding on leaders is thousands of years old.

2Hammurabi ruled Babylon, in Mesopotamia, from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. Late in his reign, he had about 282 laws carved on stone pillars called steles and set up in cities of his kingdom. Almost every law follows the same pattern: if a person does this, then this shall happen. Scribes went on copying the laws onto clay tablets for more than a thousand years after his death.

3People often picture the code as a list of cruel punishments, and some of its penalties were harsh. To see what the laws were really about, historians sort them by subject. The table below sorts the laws that survive on the best-known stele. Centuries after Hammurabi, a conquering king carried that stele away and had part of it scraped smooth, so a block of laws is missing from it. A few of them are known from clay copies.

4About 1,300 years after Hammurabi, the Romans also wrote down their laws. Ordinary citizens, called plebeians, had complained that judges from wealthy families bent unwritten customs. About 450 BCE, Rome's laws were set up in the Forum, the city's main public square, on twelve tablets. The tablets are lost, but later Roman writers quoted parts of them.

5Today the rule of law means that laws are written and made known ahead of time, that they apply to everyone in the same way, and that leaders must obey them as well. The U.S. Constitution, for example, forbids ex post facto laws: a government may not punish a person for an act that was legal when the person did it.

From Hammurabi's Code (adapted from translations)

Law 108. If a woman who keeps a tavern does not accept grain at its full weight as payment for drink, but takes silver, and the drink she gives is worth less than the grain, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.

Law 117. If a man cannot pay a debt and sells his wife, son or daughter, or hands them over to work off the debt, they shall work in the lender's house for three years. In the fourth year they shall be set free.

Laws 168–169. If a man wants to cut his son off from his inheritance, the judges shall look into the case. If the son has not done a serious wrong, the father may not cut him off. For a first serious wrong the father shall forgive the son; only after a second may he cut him off.

Law 251. If a man's ox is known to gore, and the city has warned the owner, but he has not blunted its horns or tied it up, and it gores and kills a free man, the owner shall pay half a mina of silver.

From Rome's Twelve Tables (about 450 BCE, adapted from later writers' quotations)

Table VI. When a man makes a contract or a sale, what he has said aloud shall be binding.

Table VII. A road shall be 8 feet wide where it runs straight and 16 feet wide where it turns.

Table XII. Whatever the people have ordered last shall be the law.