Hammurabi Research Paper

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Human beings are advanced creatures, and advanced creatures need guidelines to be productive and to survive in a society. Humanity has had many codes of law throughout history, like Cyrus the Great of Persia’s “Charter of Freedom of Mankind” and the Torah and Ten Commandments of the Hebrews (gwu.edu 1). Although Hammurabi’s Code is, “one of the most important monuments in the history of the human race” (Johns v), it is not the first code of law in history, even though it is usually given this credit. Hammurabi’s code is simply not the oldest legal code in the world because of the earlier code of Ur-Nammu and the codes of Menes in ancient Egypt. Hammurabi’s Code itself was not late to the law code party; it is a very early written code of law. The Code itself, in the physical form we still have today, is a large block of black stone, about two and a half meters high (Johns ix). At the top of the structure is an image of King Hammurabi receiving the law from the God Samas, the judge of heaven and earth, who is sitting before him (Johns ix). Below this image is one thousand one hundred and…show more content…
Some of these laws made sense, if a judge blunders a case, he will be expelled from the judgeship. If a building falls because of its bad design and kills the owner, the builder is killed. If it kills the owner’s son, the builder’s son is killed (Horne). This was all basic and all fair, but was it the first of its kind? In 3100 B.C., Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt into one large kingdom, and his reign lasted until 2850 B.C. (gwu.edu) He had a code of conduct for Egyptian civilization, but not a set of laws, per se (gwu.edu). Hammurabi’s code came around in about 1750 B.C. (gwu.edu) Many claim this was the first written law code, (gwu.edu, Horne, and any other casual history learner) but there was at least one that we know of that preceded

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