Stele of Hummurabi
Who wrote the earliest writing code law? Hammurabi was the ruler who chiefly established the greatness of Babylon, the world's first metropolis. He is the earliest-known example of a ruler proclaiming publicly to his people an entire body of laws, arranged in orderly groups, so that all men might read and know what was required of them. Hammurabi's most famous claim to fame is his law code. The code is inscribed on a magnificent stele of black diorite, eight feet high, found at Susa in A.D. 1902. Formerly it had stood in Babylon, but the Elamites carried it off when they conquered Babylon in the twelfth century B.C. It is now in the Louver Museum in Paris. At the top of the stele is a finely sculptured scene showing Hammurabi standing before the sun god Shamash (the patron of law and justice), who is seated and is giving the laws to Hammurabi. Beneath the scene the laws are inscribed in beautiful cuneiform characters in fifty-one columns of text. The code is inscribed on a tall black-basalt stele that was carried off as booty to Susa in 1157 B.C., together with the Naram-Sin stele. At the top is a relief depicting Hammurabi in the presence of the flame-should-dered sun god, Shamash. The king raises his hand in respect. The god b
Amongst the regulations set forth on the Stele of Hammurabi are the distinctions of class. Not that it was deemed unfair at the time, but women were held in lower esteem than men. But, there were repercussions to be endured for abuse of women. And the artist seems to have tentatively explored the notion of forehortening a device for suggesting dept by repersenting a figure or object at an angle, rather than frontally or in profile. Even a law code was in those days regarded as a subject for prayer, though the prayers here are chiefly cursing of whoever shall neglect or destroy the law. His great headdress with its four pair of borns is in ceptions. The King of Mesopotamia, it seems, had been given a set of rules to live under by the Sun God, Shamash. The penalty for striking your father was a nasty little bit of barbarism the son's hand was cut off. This noted stone was found in the year 1901, not in Babylon, but in a city of the Persian mountains, to which some later conqueror must have carried it in triumph. The sculptor depicted Shamash in the familiar convention of combined front and side views, but with two important exceptions. One did not mess with the Gods in those days, as was evidenced by the strictness of the rules. Justice, one might surmise, was relative. you can be sure that the law is the law and ancient times were only different from the present in the intensity of enforcement. Although the ancient Sumerians had earlier laws, the Stele of Hammurabi detailed the most comprehensive of them.
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