THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE LAWS
OF BABYLONIA AND THE LAWS OF
THE HEBREW PEOPLES
LECTURE I
The discovery of the principal record of the system of enactments now known by the name of the Code of Hammurabi was made in December 1901 and January 1902.
At Susa, the ancient Persepolis, named ‘Shushan the Palace’ in the Book of Daniel, situated in Persia, once the ancient capital of Elam, the excavators, working under the direction of J. de Morgan for the French Ministry of Instruction, found three large pieces of black diorite, which when fitted together formed a monolith stela, about 2·25 metres high, tapering upwards from 1·9 to 1·65 metres. The stone itself is in the Louvre Museum in Paris, but a beautiful reproduction of it stands in the Babylonian Room of the British Museum.
At the top of the stela is engraved in low bas-relief a representation of Hammurabi himself receiving his laws from a seated god, usually taken to be the sun-god Shamash, who was regarded in Babylonia as the supreme judge of gods and men, whose children or attendants were Mishâru and Kittu or Rectitude and Right.
Below this scene begins the inscription, written in Semitic Babylonian, then called Akkadian, and arranged in parallel narrow columns. These columns were read from left to right and downward precisely like those of a modern newspaper, but each column goes across the stela like a belt. Consequently a reader must turn his head on one side to read the inscription.
On the front of the stela sixteen columns are preserved, and traces of five more which have been intentionally erased. Analogy with similar cases among the many Babylonian monuments found at Susa, on which the original inscription has been partly cut out to make way for the name and titles of Shutruk-nakhunde the king of Elam who had carried them off as trophies of his conquests in Babylonia, suggests that a like purpose was entertained with respect to this stela but only partly carried out. Unfortunately a break in the text of the Code is thus caused which our other records have only partly enabled us to restore.
The back of the stela completely preserves twenty-eight columns, except where a few natural faults in the stone obscure the characters. The whole inscription may be estimated as having once contained forty-nine columns, four thousand lines, and about eight thousand words.
The characters are of an archaic type, much fancied by the kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon, of whom Hammurabi was the sixth in succession, and paralleled by other inscriptions of his. Thus, apart from his own words, we can date it as a contemporary record of the text. It was undoubtedly engraved on the stone by a stone-cutter working from a copy of the text written on clay in the cursive script of the period. This accounts for one or two scribal errors, which are, however, easily detected and readily corrected.