This research will examine the historical importance of the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, with special reference to the Code of Hammurabi. The research will set forth the historical and cultural context in which the Code emerged and discuss why it remains of decisive importance and relevance to the modern period in general and to the shape of modern Western civilization in particular.
Core postulates of Western culture encourage knowledge of the universe, an impulse toward certainty about the position of people in the universe, and implications of that position. While the cultural divide between Western thought as articulated in and by ancient Greek civilization and the thought and praxis of the ancient civilizations preceding that of Greece seems clear, something approaching a postulate of a knowable cosmos also can be discerned in the first high civilizations of the Near East, notably Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The first Babylonian Empire was distinguished by the Code of Hammurabi. Wells calls Hammurabi Babylonia's first "great king" (141) and locates his reign around 2100 B.C. Hayes et al. say that Hammurabi was Babylonia's sixth king, ruling 1947-1905 B.C. Another source dates Hammurabi's reign at 1750-1708 B.C. (Hammurabi 166). But the precise years are less important than what Hammurabi's reign--and especially the Code--represent in the context of Western civilization. Wells characterizes Hammurabi's rule as "a firm grip upon the affairs of the community," during which he was able to consolidate power over the whole of Mesopotamia and promulgate a code of law recognized as the first of its kind in human history (Wells 184).
Undoubtedly, the Code was the highest and best articulation of social organization in Mesopotamia, and its historical importance owes something to the fact that it is the oldest such code ever discovered. The stone cuneiform engraving contain ing the Code was unearthed only in 1902 ("Code"). Herodotus, wr...