The Code of Hammurabi

Why this matters

Lex talionis, an eye for an eye, sounds like a simple rule until real numbered laws from the Code show it applied differently depending on whether the injured party was a free person, a commoner, or an enslaved person. The punishment for the same injury moved with the victim's social rank, not with the act itself.

Carving close to 300 of those laws onto a public stele under the god Shamash was itself a political act, a way for Hammurabi to hold a large empire together through one shared, visible standard everyone could check for themselves. Students tend to read the stele as a list of punishments until they ask who it was built to persuade.

From one teacher to another

I built this one around the actual laws, not a summary of them. Students read real numbered laws from L.W. King's 1915 translation - the eye-for-an-eye punishments, the penalty for a builder whose house collapses and kills its owner - and work out for themselves how the punishment shifts depending on whether the victim is a free person, a commoner, or an enslaved person. That's the move I wanted: instead of being told Babylonian law was unequal, students find the inequality themselves in the primary source. The lesson also covers why Hammurabi bothered carving nearly 300 laws onto a public stone stele under the sun god Shamash, and the argument ties back to how early states used written, displayed law to project authority. It's a strong pair with any lesson on early river valley government since it gives students a concrete legal document instead of an abstract description of "law codes."