The Oldest Code of Laws in the World The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon B.C. 2285-2242

The Oldest Code of Laws in the World, by Hammurabi, King of Babylon

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Hammurabi, King of Babylon, Translated by C. H. W. Johns

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Title: The Oldest Code of Laws in the World

The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon

B.C. 2285-2242

Author: Hammurabi, King of Babylon

Release Date: November 25, 2005 [eBook #17150]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLDEST CODE OF LAWS IN THE WORLD***

Transcribed from the 1903 T. & T. Clark edition by David Price, email [email protected]

THE OLDEST CODE OF LAWS IN THE WORLD

THE CODE OF LAWS PROMULGATED BY

HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON

b.c. 2285-2242

TRANSLATED

by

C. H. W. JOHNS, M.A.

LECTURER IN ASSYRIOLOGY, QUEENS’ COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

author of assyrian deeds and documents

an assyrian doomsday book

EDINBURGH

T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET

1903

PRINTED BY

MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED

FOR

T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH

london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent, and co. limited

new york: charles scribner’s sons

first impression . . . February 1903.

second impression . . . March 1903.

third impression . . . May 1903.

fourth impression . . . June 1903.

The discovery and decipherment of this Code is the greatest event in Biblical Archæology for many a day.  A translation of the Code, done by Mr. Johns of Queens’ College, Cambridge, the highest living authority on this department of study, has just been published by Messrs. T. & T. Clark in a cheap and attractive booklet.  Winckler says it is the most important Babylonian record which has thus far been brought to light.—The Expository Times.

INTRODUCTION

The Code of Hammurabi is one of the most important monuments in the history of the human race.  Containing as it does the laws which were enacted by a king of Babylonia in the third millennium B.C., whose rule extended over the whole of Mesopotamia from the mouths of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates to the Mediterranean coast, we must regard it with interest.  But when we reflect that the ancient Hebrew tradition ascribed the migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees to this very period, and clearly means to represent their tribe father as triumphing over this very same Hammurabi (Amraphel, Gen. xiv. 1), we can hardly doubt that these very laws were part of that tradition.  At any rate, they must have served to mould and fix the ideas of right throughout that great empire, and so form the state of society in Canaan when, five hundred years later, the Hebrews began to dominate that region.

Such was the effect produced on the minds of succeeding generations by this superb codification of the judicial decisions of past ages, which had come to be regarded as ‘the right,’ that two thousand years and more later it was made a text-book for study in the schools of Babylonia, being divided for that purpose into some twelve chapters, and entitled, after the Semitic custom, Nînu ilu sirum, from its opening words.  In Assyria also, in the seventh century b.c., it was studied in a different edition, apparently under the name of ‘The Judgments of Righteousness which Hammurabi, the great king, set up.’  These facts point to it as certain to affect Jewish views before and after the Exile, in a way that we may expect to find as fundamental as the Babylonian influence in cosmology or religion.

For many years fragments have been known, have been studied, and from internal evidence ascribed to the period of the first dynasty of Babylon, even called by the name Code Hammurabi.  It is just cause for pride that Assyriology, so young a science as only this year to have celebrated the centenary of its birth, is able to emulate astronomy and predict the discovery of such bright stars as this.  But while we certainly should have directed our telescopes to Babylonia for the rising of this light from the East, it was really in Elam, at Susa, the old Persepolis, that the find was made.  The Elamites were the great rivals of Babylonia for centuries, and it seems likely that some Elamite conqueror carried off the stone from a temple at Sippara, in Babylonia.

However that may be, we owe it to the French Government, who have been carrying on explorations at Susa for years under the superintendence of M. J. de Morgan, that a monument, only disinterred in January, has been copied, transcribed, translated, and published, in a superb quarto volume, by October.  The ancient text is reproduced by photogravure in a way that enables a student to verify word by word what the able editor, Father V. Scheil, Professeur à l’École des Hautes-Études, has given as his reading of the archaic signs.  The volume, which appears as Tome IV., Textes Élamites-Sémitiques, of the Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse (Paris, Leroux, 1902), is naturally rather expensive for the ordinary reader.  Besides, the rendering of the eminent French savant, while distinguished by that clear, neat phrasing which is so charming a feature of all his work, is often rather a paraphrase than a translation.  The ordinary reader who desires to estimate for himself the importance of the new monument will be forced to wonder how and why the same word in the original gets such different renderings.  Prolonged study will be needed to bring out fully the whole meaning of many passages, and it may conduce to such a result to present the public with an alternative rendering in an English dress.  Needless to say, scholars will continue to use Scheil’s edition as the ultimate source, but for comparative purposes a literal translation may be welcome as an introduction.

The monument itself consists of a block of black diorite, nearly eight feet high, found in pieces, but readily rejoined.  It contains on the obverse a very interesting representation of the King Hammurabi, receiving his laws from the seated sun-god Šamaš, ‘the judge of heaven and earth.’  Then follow, on the obverse, sixteen columns of writing with 1114 lines.  There were five more columns on