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."