Hummurabis Code

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98) presents Hammurabi’s Code as a “Law Code” of king Hammurabi. It was, in turn something quite different from a Code of Laws existing in our judicial and legislative structure of government and society. Hammurabi’s Code- “A law Code” or a set of royal decisions??? As written in Mesopotamia: The Mighty Kings, (p26), the code consists if 282 laws that are branched at the beginning and end by a prologue and epilogue. The “Code” touches almost every aspect of everyday life in Babylonya. As the prologue states, the laws were supposedly written “to promote the welfare of the people,…to cause just to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak” ( The Human Record, p 12). Furthermore, just like a real Law Code, each “law” is written in the form of conditional sentence: in which the phrase is introduced by a certain condition, “if” and the consequence follows “then”. Another fact makes Hammurabi’s “Code” so similar to the U.S. ...

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led to the collapse of a home and the death of owner could expect to be put to death himself. Another, even more savage condition takes place when a woman who happen to neglect her house and family and humiliate her husband, would be forced to undergo “trial-by-water” (Mesopotamia, p134). Such primitive ideas seem totally radical and astonishing to American ideology based on Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness…” (United States History and Government, p13). However, sticking to the original goal of History (to rediscover, and learn the original past), and setting aside our ethnocentric motives, we should attempt to look at this ...

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