Historical Introduction To Law

Hammurabi was king of Babylon between 1730 and 1685 BC. A great diplomat and a shrewd politician, he was the creator of the First Empire of Babylon, which he extended through his conquests and endowed with a centralized administration. The Code of Hammurabi — discovered in Susa (present-day Iran) by a French archaeological mission in 1901, in the form of a beautiful 2.25-metre-high diorite stele kept in the Louvre — is not a real code of laws, but a simple collection of judgments from which judges could draw inspiration when stating the law. From the point of view of legal literature, the Babylonian kingdom had judicial structures typical of the Mesopotamian tradition: the king was the supreme judge, the members of the administration (especially the governors) often had judicial attributions, as did the local authorities (councils of elders and city district councils), but there were also professional judges (dayyanum). These authorities often dispense justice in a collegial manner, after an investigation procedure based on the search for evidence, in particular testimonies and written documents such as contracts. This explains the amount of legal documents known for this period...