The Code of Hammurabi (Codex Hammurabi) is a well-preserved ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC (middle chronology) in ancient Babylon. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi. One nearly complete example of the Code survives today, inscribed on a seven foot, four inch tall basalt stele in the Akkadian language in the cuneiform script. One of the first written codes of law in recorded history. These laws were written on a stone tablet standing over eight feet tall (2.4 meters) that was found in 1901.

Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to be the cradle of civilization—home of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, as well as the great Code of Hammurabi. The Code was only part of a rich juridical culture from 2200–1600 BCE that saw the invention of writing and the development of its relationship to law, among other remarkable firsts. Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, Dominique Charpin focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers considerable insight into how writing and the law evolved together to forge the principles of authority, precedent, and documentation that dominate us to this day. As legal codes throughout the region evolved through advances in cuneiform writing, kings and governments were able to stabilize their control over distant realms and impose a common language—which gave rise to complex social systems overseen by magistrates, judges, and scribes that eventually became the vast empires of history books. Sure to attract any reader with an interest in the ancient Near East, as well as rhetoric, legal history, and classical studies, this book is an innovative account of the intertwined histories of law and language.

Exploring key historical events as well as the day-to-day life of the ancient Babylonians. A comprehensive guide to one of history's most profound civilizations.

Among the best-known and most esteemed people known from antiquity is the Babylonian king Hammurabi. His fame and reputation are due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. This book offers a new interpretation of the Laws of Hammurabi. Ancient scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a set of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribesin articulating legal thinking. The tradition that inspired the Laws of Hammurabi continued outside of Mesopotamia. It influenced biblical law and may have shaped Greek and Roman law.

This book, which includes new translations of the old Babylonian laws of Hammurabi, is the second book by the author examining, from a historical Arabic linguistic perspective, a major Akkadian document. The first book offered new translations of three tablets from a literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in a late Babylonian language. The pioneering methodology used by the author to decipher the ancient Mesopotamian texts in both documents involves the primary utilization of old etymological Arabic manuscripts written by hundreds of accomplished scholars more than a thousand years ago. Using this methodology does not only provide more accurate, non-speculated, translations, and preserve the spirit and linguistic style of the original texts, but also provides more realistic phonetic values of the cuneiform signs. This would result in having more realistic overall text readings suitable to the one geographical and historical environment where these texts were produced, namely the greater Arabian Peninsula. The text of the Hammurabi stele offers students of both Arabic and Assyriology a perfect and unique opportunity to identify the language and grammar of its ancient Arabic language. Its vocalizations of subjects, objects, verbs, and genitives are astonishingly identical to that of classical Arabic. The loose and sometimes “chaotic” placement of words in sentences is strikingly identical to that of pre-Islamic Arabic. In, fact, the older the formal Akkadian language it seems the clearer its Arabic identity! Offering a textbook reference value, the author provided the numbered, phonetic Latin transcription for each law right above its corresponding, numbered Arabic transcription. Furthermore, he translated the text of each law literally, into Arabic and English, to illustrate how its translation was concluded, and to preserve its overall linguistic style, accounting for every word in its actual text. For easier reading experience, a full subject guide to the laws of Hammurabi is provided. All reference entries from both the historical Arabic manuscripts and the modern dictionaries of Assyriology are also provided in the appendix. In his expanded introduction, the author discussed the layout, script, and language of the Hammurabi code stele in the Louvre, and through the evidence of Hammurabi’s own words in a key paragraph in his prologue, he offered the possible meanings of the nickname Hammurabi.