Hammurabi

Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon and reigned for about forty years, c. 1792 to 1750 BC. He made his city the head of a kingdom that took in most of Mesopotamia, and he is remembered above all as the king under whose name a great collection of laws was set down in Akkadian.

The laws were cut in cuneiform on a tall block of black diorite, topped by a relief of the king standing before the sun-god Shamash. The stele was carried off to Susa in antiquity, where French excavators found it in 1901-02. It is now in the Louvre. Several columns of the text had been chiselled away, and the gap is filled in part from clay-tablet copies. It is given here in C. H. W. Johns's translation of 1903.