What Were the Earliest Laws Really Like?

Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story

If you know the name of one person from the first human civilization in Mesopotamia, it’s probably Hammurabi. You might know a couple of others — Gilgamesh, perhaps for his appearance in the world’s first work of literature, or Sargon, for establishing the first empire — but Hammurabi is the one Mesopotamian that everybody is pretty much guaranteed to learn about in middle or high school.

This is quite an honor, to be the one human being that everybody knows from the society that invented government, cities, writing, and the wheel. But he doesn’t entirely deserve the recognition that he gets.

Hammurabi was an important king, ruling between the late 1800s and mid-1700s BCE. He ruled over the city of Babylon and, during his lifetime, expanded Babylon’s influence to rule over a number of other city-states in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. Impressive, no doubt, but this isn’t why we remember him. Have you ever heard of Shamshi-Adad I, the ruler who consolidated a similar amount of power …