Now, this code, or list, of laws engraved on tablets is most interesting to us not only because it is ancient, but also because it is so very modern. I mean that although these laws were made so very long ago, they are laws which we could very nearly accept as suitable for us to live under to-day. Our lives would be very little altered if we were to try to lead them according to those laws instead of according to the laws under which we actually do live.

If Khammurabi, in 2250 B.C., had these laws engraven, we may be nearly sure that they were the laws by which the country was governed many years before that. How long before, we cannot tell. Tablets on which some of them were recorded were found in what has been called the library (though I do not suppose that there were exactly what we should call books in it, and the name "library" comes from liber, a book)—collected by a certain great king of Assyria, Assurbanipal or Sardanapalus, by name, who reigned in Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, about 700 B.C. or a little later. A great many similar records and tablets collected by this king have been found. But a far more complete list of the laws was found later at Susa, a city which was afterwards called Persepolis.

Not only are the laws themselves such as we might make and use, but they seem to show that there existed in Babylon at that far-away time a society and a kind of life not at all unlike ours. There were doctors, lawyers and merchants, and the fees of the doctors and the ways in which the merchants were to carry on their trade were fixed by the laws. It is clear that there were a great many slaves employed—that is a difference, of course, from our society. The punishments for law-breaking were more severe than ours. Murder is the only crime which we now punish with death. In Khammurabi's code, burglary and stealing are punished by death; so is any attempt to induce witnesses in a case at law to give false witness; and there are numerous other offences for which death was the punishment in Babylon, but for which we should make the offender pay a fine or go to prison for a while. But we have to remember that it is not so very many years ago even in this country since a man could be hanged for forgery or for stealing a sheep. The laws of Khammurabi are not more severe than ours were not much more than a hundred years ago.

When there were serfs in England, labourers almost in a state of slavery, English law made a great distinction between them and freemen. An offence against the laws, if committed by a serf, was very much more heavily punished than the same offence committed by a freeman. And we find exactly the same distinction made in this ancient code; the slave suffers far more heavily than the freeman.

Some of the laws show the importance of the canals for watering the land, and each owner of land beside a canal was made responsible for the canal bank which ran through or beside his property. If he let it fall into bad repair, and the water, overflowing, damaged his neighbour's land or drowned his sheep, he had to make good the loss caused to his neighbour.

The law of "a tooth for a tooth" and "an eye for an eye" which we find in the Bible, in the book of Exodus, we find here too. If you knocked out a man's eye in a fight, you would have to submit to having an eye of your own knocked out. If you knocked out a tooth, a tooth of yours would be knocked out.

Susa, where the full code of Khammurabi was found, was the capital of the kingdom of a people called Elamites, of whom you hear in the Bible. Elam lay on the eastern, the Persian, side of Babylonia, and the Elamites gave continual trouble to the Babylonian conquerors. The code is cut on a great block of black stone eight feet high. It is in forty-four columns and consists of no less than 3654 lines—a lengthy document. And at the top of it there is cut the figure of King Khammurabi receiving the tablets of the law from Shamash, the great sun-god. It must remind us of Moses receiving the tablets with the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

There can be little doubt that these laws, more or less as they are graven on this stone, were those under which the greater number of the Semitic tribes lived which inhabited Syria and Palestine. Among these tribes were the Jews. For this reason we may imagine that when the Babylonians made attacks upon them and reduced them, as they did from time to time, to submission, their own laws and customs were not much altered. They had to pay tribute, perhaps, and their homes were broken up, and some of them, like the Jews, were taken away into Babylonia, but they went among a people not altogether different from themselves either in nationality or in their ways of living.

Art in Babylonia

And just as we are surprised by the advanced state of civilisation which these old laws show us, so we have to be no less astonished by the fine works of art which they made. Stone, as we have said, was rare in Babylonia; therefore they looked on it as precious, and kept it for engraving. Some of the cut stones of very early date are finely finished. In the Louvre in Paris there is a splendidly worked Babylonian vase with a hunting scene of lions upon it, and it is thought to have been made long before the time of this Khammurabi, whose code we have been speaking of. There were lions in this country then, though there are none now. You may remember many references to lions in the Bible.