Laws in Stone and Bronze: A Museum Hall

Hall 7: When Laws Were Written Down

1Before laws were written, most communities followed customs that people passed down by memory. Rulers, elders or priests decided what those customs meant. A person accused of wrongdoing often had no way to check the rule for himself. The two objects in this hall show what changed when laws were written down for people to see.

2Hammurabi ruled the city of Babylon, in Mesopotamia, from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. Late in his reign he had about 282 laws carved on tall stone pillars called steles, which were set up in public places. One stele of black stone, more than 7 feet tall, was found in 1901 in the ruins of Susa, in present-day Iran. An enemy army had carried it there as war loot centuries after Hammurabi died. At the top, a carving shows Hammurabi standing before Shamash, the god Babylonians linked with justice.

3Rome's story came more than 1,000 years later. In the early Roman Republic, judges came from the patricians, the wealthy old families. The plebeians, the ordinary citizens, complained that patrician judges could interpret unwritten customs however they liked. After years of protest, a group of ten men wrote Rome's laws down. About 450 BCE the laws were set up in the Forum, Rome's main public square, on twelve tablets, probably made of bronze.

4The original tablets did not survive; they were probably destroyed when invaders called Gauls burned part of Rome about 390 BCE. Historians know the laws from later Roman writers, such as the speaker Cicero, who quoted pieces of them. Cicero wrote that when he was a boy, schoolboys learned the Twelve Tables by heart, more than 300 years after the tablets were set up.

5More than 2,000 years later, the writers of the U.S. Constitution also set down the nation's highest laws in writing. The Constitution forbids Congress to pass a "bill of attainder," a law that punishes one named person without a trial. Above the entrance of the U.S. Supreme Court building, finished in 1935, are carved the words "Equal Justice Under Law."

Panel A: The Stele of Hammurabi (about 1754 BCE)

From the opening: The gods called me, Hammurabi, to bring justice to the land, to destroy the wicked, so that the strong should not harm the weak.

Law 5. If a judge decides a case and later his decision is found to be wrong through his own fault, he shall pay twelve times the fine in that case and be removed from the judge's seat forever.

Law 196. If a man puts out the eye of a man of the noble class, his own eye shall be put out.

Law 198. If he puts out the eye of a commoner or breaks a commoner's bone, he shall pay one mina of silver.

Law 199. If he puts out the eye of another man's slave or breaks the slave's bone, he shall pay half of the slave's price.

Law 229. If a builder builds a house that is not strong, and the house falls and kills its owner, the builder shall be put to death.

From the closing: Let any person who has been wronged come before this stele, have the writing read aloud, and understand his case.

Panel B: The Twelve Tables (about 450 BCE, as quoted by later writers)

Table I. If anyone is called to court, he shall go.

Table VIII. If anyone destroys another person's limb and does not settle with him, let there be retaliation in kind.

Table VIII. If anyone breaks the bone of a free man with his hand or a club, he shall pay 300 bronze coins; if of a slave, 150.

Table IX. Laws shall not be proposed that target one single person.