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 in northern Mesopotamia while Hammurabi ruled in the south?

We know Hammurabi because of one thing: his code of laws, which was discovered on a stunning stele. The stele was found in Susa, Iran, in 1901, having been taken from Babylon by invaders after Hammurabi’s death. It’s now in the Louvre.

Photo by Mbzt, CC 3.0

Schoolchildren all over the world learn that Hammurabi’s code — famous for its “eye for an eye” vision of retributive justice — was the world’s first. It’s used to illustrate the importance of ancient laws, and teachers generally emphasize the violence of the laws and the society they governed. But the truth is, as it so often is, more complicated than that.

Hammurabi’s is the most complete and longest code of laws that we have from Mesopotamia, but it’s actually not the first. Fifty years after the discovery of the Hammurabi stele, archaeologists discovered the Code of Ur-Nammu — a king of Ur who, in his time, had also conquered much of southern Mesopotamia — on some cuneiform tablets. Ur-Nammu’s laws are almost 400 years older than Hammurabi’s. As much time passed between Ur-Nammu’s laws and Hammurabi's as has passed between the lifetime of Louis XIV and today.

Public domain

Ur-Nammu’s code is different from Hammurabi’s. Rather than inflicting physical pain on lawbreakers, Ur-Nammu’s government mostly requires people to pay fines. It’s less an-eye-for-an-eye than half-a-mina-of-silver-for-an-eye.

But even after its discovery, Ur-Nammu’s code was unable to claim the spotlight from Hammurabi’s. There are some legitimate reasons for this (the tablets containing the code are incomplete) and some less legitimate ones (Hammurabi’s stele looks cool, and its violent punishments are more likely to hook the attention of ninth graders).

But maybe neither Ur-Nammu nor Hammurabi deserves the spotlight. Three hundred years before Ur-Nammu (and almost 700 before Hammurabi), another Mesopotamian king issued a code of laws, and his ideas may be the most interesting of all.

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Urukagina was the king of Lagash and Girsu, two cities near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a little more than 4,300 years ago.

We don’t know all that much about him. We don’t have any images of him, even of the stylized kind that we have of Hammurabi and Ur-Nammu. He may have had a humble background; he’s not named Urukagina, “son of” so-and-so, the way the son of an important man would be. He seems to have usurped power with the help of the priestly class, an “oligarchic faction,” or both. He took the exalted title of “lugal,” king, which had not been used by his predecessors.

Most of what we know about Urukagina comes from his own propaganda — edicts and announcements that archaeologists have found over the years. The most visually interesting of them are these cones, which were inscribed with paeans to Urukagina’s greatness and then buried in the foundations of buildings:

Public domain

In these texts, Urukagina unsurprisingly makes himself sound pretty good. We should take his claims with a grain of salt — they are, after all, royal propaganda — but, even if his claims aren’t entirely accurate, their content is revealing. These writings don’t quite constitute a code of laws, but they serve the same purpose, illustrating how Urukagina envisioned his relationship to his subjects.

Urukagina could have boasted about his immense power or his territorial conquests, but instead he recorded for posterity how he made his government better for the people.

What did Urukagina do for his subjects?

• He reined in corrupt government officials, firing inspectors who seized people’s land and kept it for themselves.

• He eliminated the debt that had burdened so many of his subjects, freeing those who had been enslaved because they could not pay what they owed.

• He protected ordinary people from being forced to sell their property at unfair prices.

• He declared that he would protect “the widow and the orphan” against depredations by the powerful.

• In summary, “He freed the inhabitants of Lagash from usury, burdensome controls, hunger, theft, murder, and seizure [of their property and persons]. He established liberty [amargi].”

Compare this to the proclamation at the beginning of Hammurabi’s code of laws, which is mostly about how great he is:

Hammurabi, the prince, called of Bel am I, making riches and increase, enriching Nippur and Dur-ilu beyond compare, sublime patron of E-kur; who reestablished Eridu and purified the worship of E-apsu; who conquered the four quarters of the world…

Hammurabi brags occasionally about helping people (”the lord who granted new life to Uruk, who brought plenteous water to its inhabitants”), but it’s mostly about how powerful he is and how pleased the gods are with his heroics.

Urukagina may have been the first leader to promise anything like freedom or liberty to his subjects (the word he used, amargi, meant something closer to freedom from debts than the absolute freedom we might think of today). Some people see it as an early statement of human rights, although ancient Mesopotamians had a very different understanding of rights than we do today.

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The contrast between Hammurabi and Urukagina highlights a tension in political leadership that goes back to the very origin of government: are leaders in office to glorify and enrich themselves, or are they there to serve their citizens?

Some of the most famous ancient leaders — the sort that we give the nickname “the Great” — probably weren’t all that great in reality. They belonged to the group that aggrandized their own power at the expense of ordinary people. We are surrounded by plenty of political leaders who think the same way today.

Often, the idea that might makes right, that leaders exploit their citizens, feels like the default setting, in place since time immemorial. But we should remember that the other strain of leadership also goes back to the origins of human civilization.

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