The Code of Hammurabi
The Teaching
When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid as firm as those of heaven and earth.
Then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.
Commentary
The Code of Hammurabi is the oldest substantially preserved body of law in human history, carved on a black diorite stele eight feet tall and set up in the temple of Marduk in Babylon for any literate citizen to read. What it records is not the invention of law but a civilization's first surviving attempt to write the cosmic order down so that no one could pretend not to know what it required.
The famous principle of lex talionis, an eye for an eye, is almost always misread. In the ancient world the default response to injury was unlimited retribution: blood feuds that consumed entire families across generations. Hammurabi's law is a limiting rule, not a vindictive one. It says the response must be proportional and no greater. This is the same impulse that produced every later constitutional tradition: power restrained by a written standard that the powerful are also bound by.
The stele's prologue is what matters most for the body politic. Hammurabi locates his authority not in his own person but in the cosmic order, the same order the Egyptians called Ma'at and the Tao Te Ching called the Tao. Law is the original attempt to express divine ordering principle in human social structures, and the diagnosis the traditions later refine is already implicit here: when the law drifts from the order it was meant to express, the civilization sickens. When those who enforce it forget that they are accountable to the same standard, the body politic loses its coherence.