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In Our Time
The Code of Hammurabi
00:49:49
The impact of the wide-ranging laws of Hammurabi, King of Babylon from 4,000 years ago.
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Melvyn Bragg
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description of wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Almost 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi, King of Babylon, had his laws carved into a black basalt pillar for all to see. There were rules on an eye for an eye, how to handle murder, divorce, witchcraft, false accusations and much more. They were so impressive that they were copied and shared for the next millennium. And when what's now known as the Code of Hammurabi Re emerged last century and was displayed in the Louvre, the king's reputation as a lawgiver was such that he's been commemorated in the US Capitol and the International Court of Justice. With me to discuss the Code of Hammurabi are Francis Reynolds Shillito, Fellow and Associate professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at the Queen's College, Selina Wisnam, Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle east at the University of Leicester, and Martin Worthington, professor in Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. Martin, what can you tell us about the man Hammurabi?
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Martin Worthington
Hammurabi was very lucky in many respects. For a start, he was a thug, a conqueror, and one of these people who hoovered up smaller kingdoms than his own. It didn't last very long, but in his lifetime he had a reign of 43 years and he made it big. He was remembered for a long time in Mesopotamian history, and then he got even Luckier when he was remembered in modernity, because, as you said, in 1901, they found his law code and dug it up, and everybody got very excited about it. So Hammurabi was an Amorite. We're talking about ancient Iraq, and in particular, somewhere near modern Baghdad, around the city of Babylon. Hammurabi was a sharum dunum Sharbabilim, a mighty king, a king of Babylon. And that was the base from which he hoovered up the other kingdoms, Mari, Eshnunna, Lhasa and various other places. He had a family life, he had successors, he betrayed alliances, and he had a massive palace which hasn't been excavated, but he was responsible for letters issued in his name, which we can access legal records written at the time of his rule. So he's a fascinating figure from the ancient Middle East.
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Melvyn Bragg
And when was he ruling exactly?
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Martin Worthington
Around about 1750 BC.
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Melvyn Bragg
So what about Mesopotamia, the area where Babylonia was located? Certainly, but how big is Mesopotamia and how much of it does he control?
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Martin Worthington
Mesopotamia means the land between the rivers in Greek, and it's often referred to as the cradle of civilization. Writing was probably invented there, cities were born there, nation states came into being there. So Mesopotamia has a huge role in human history. We know a lot about it thanks to cuneiform tablets, tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script from about 3,000 to roughly the year zero. That's 3,000 years of human history. It has the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and they intersect with all sorts of histories at different times. The Assyrians conquered Egypt, the Babylonians deported the Jews off to Babylon, Gilgamesh. Some of the first poetry comes from there. So Mesopotamia is sort of modern Iraq, and it stretches a bit further into Syria, into Turkey and sometimes into Iran. It's a fascinating area of study and very exciting.
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Melvyn Bragg
Fran Reynolds. Let's talk a little bit about the code and what it's inscribed on a stele. Can you tell us what a Steler is and describe it for us?
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Most famous copy of Hammuravi's laws is on a beautiful black basalt or deerite stele in the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris. So when you go into the gallery, you see this enormous stone. It's about two and a quarter meters high. It's still got a beautiful natural curve from the shape of the rock it was carved from. It's very impressive. It makes the viewer feel quite small, which I'm sure was the intention of the people who made it. On the top, there's actually a relief picture of King Hammurabi. Facing the sun God Shamash. Shamash is seated on a throne with sun rays coming out of his shoulders. And he holds out to the king a coiled measuring line and rod, symbols of royal authority. The kings were the gods architects. They fixed weights and measures. Hammurabi standing before Shamash on the left in a gesture of prayer. Then below those two figures, the most beautifully carved cuneiform inscription on the stele, the front and the back. The signs are in an archaising script, they're beautifully cut. So the monument is an impressive combination of both image and text.
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Melvyn Bragg
Yes. I have to confess, I was in Paris on a work trip last week and I took a couple of hours off to go and see the stele. As I gather, it's pronounced the stele and the code of Hammurabi. And it's quite astonishing how clear the cuneiform script is. And the image that you described, I mean, how has it survived for 4,000 years?
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Well, I mean, it had an eventful history because it was actually looted by the Elamites in the late second millennium BC and carried off to the city of Susa in modern day Iran. And then, as Martin mentioned, it was excavated there in the early 20th century. But the stone is incredibly hard wearing and these are carved signs rather than signs on a clay tablet. Having said that, the Elamites did erase part of the front, presumably to put an inscription therein there, but nothing was ever written.
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Melvyn Bragg
Now we have the laws themselves, almost 300 of them. But before that, there's the prologue. Tell us a bit about what the prologue is and its significance.
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
So the prologue is the first part of the text that you start reading. So you start off right underneath Shamash's throne at the top, and it tells us how the gods Anu and Enlil, the most powerful gods in Mesopotamia in this context, basically promoted the God Marduk and the city of the God Marduk, which was balanced Babylon. And given the promotion of Babylon, the gods also then promoted Hammurabi as Babylon's king. So he was basically tasked with ensuring that justice was done in the land, that the strong didn't oppress the weak, that evil and wickedness was banished. And Marduk himself basically is a parallel to the king. Now we also hear in the prologue about Alhamurabi's conquests. Effectively, it's presented as him caring for temples of the gods in different cities, but it also conveys the extent of the territory he controlled all the way from southeastern Syria right down to the Gulf and up into the Assyrian heartland in the Northeast, and then it basically leads beautifully into the laws. It's written in the first person. Hammurabi's talking himself in this text. And it just says, you know, Marduk now instructed me to make sure that my people should thrive and there's justice in the land. And then it says at that time, and then you move into law 1.
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Melvyn Bragg
So the prologue is essentially the God saying, this is the man, and you should listen to what he's saying.
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Absolutely. He has absolute 100% divine authority, and particularly as a king of justice.
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Melvyn Bragg
Selina Wissnam, as well as Hammurabi, the gods have featured throughout the epilogue and the prologue. Can you tell us a bit about the Babylonian gods?
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Selina Wisnam
Well, there's a pantheon of gods that they worship a little bit like in the Greek and Roman sense. Different gods are responsible for different things. There is a goddess of war, a sun God, who was the God of justice here depicted on the stele. And importantly, there are city gods. So Marduk is the patron of the city of Babylon. And the power of Marduk really expresses the power of the city itself. And in the prologue, when they mention that the gods have chosen Marduk to be ruler of all peoples in the lands, that is a justification for all of Hammurabi's wars. It's legitimized right there by saying that this is a divinely ordained thing. In the epilogue, the gods then are called upon for each of their functions to curse anyone who would erase Hammurabi's name, each according to their own special ability. So they are at the beginning and at the end, encompassing everything.
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Melvyn Bragg
I see. So that means that if people subsequently tried to adopt the code and call it their own, then they would be visited by the wrath of the gods.
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Yes.
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Selina Wisnam
Had the Elamites filled in that erased inscription with their own, then they would have had Hammurabi's gods to contend with.
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Melvyn Bragg
And what about the language of the code? I mean, how easy? What was literacy like at the time? How easy would it have been for people to read?
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Selina Wisnam
Well, the code says on it that let any wronged man who has a lawsuit come before my code and read it and see his case there and let his mind be at rest knowing that Hammurabi, king of justice, has it all in hand, as it were. But actually not very many people would have been able to read this. First of all, as Fran mentioned, the signs are written in a very old fashioned script, and they're also written at 90 degrees rotation, so you have to turn your head to look at it, which would be quite Awkward, considering how tall it is also, so it's not really possible to read it all. But that said, the fact that there is so much text on this monument still makes a point, because if, you know, Hammurabi is king of justice, and there would also have been a statue in front of the stealer with him in that role probably as well, then you see how much text there is, you see how many laws there are, and that in itself tells you that justice is something that is really valued and emphasized here.
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Melvyn Bragg
One thing that struck me when I saw it in the Louvre was that you have Shamash, the God, and Hammurabi in prayer, but they seem to be on the same level. Was this Hammurabi trying to suggest that, you know, he was almost equal to the gods?
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Selina Wisnam
Yes, It's a very daring depiction, actually, because even when they are looking at each other eye to eye, but Hammurabi's gaze is slightly above that of Shamash, so he's actually even looking slightly down at the God. The God is seated. They're almost the same height, but Shamash is still a little bit higher. But to portray himself as almost the same size as a God is really quite something. And there's also nobody else there in the scene. Usually kings would depict other supernatural beings around them. They might have an altar between them and the God. But there is absolutely nothing coming between Hammurabi and Shamash himself, which is a really remarkable way of showing that he's close to the gods.
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Melvyn Bragg
Thanks very much, Selina. Well, let's go on, Martin, to the code itself. After the prologue, the almost 300 laws, ranging from domestic disputes, theft, adultery, murder, and how to manage your fields, did this legal system function in practice in a way that we would recognize?
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Martin Worthington
One of the big debates about the law code is the extent to which it was actually a law code that got followed in practice versus an abstract set of declarations, and what the relation was between this written document and the practice of law. Now, on some points, it's our only source, but it is not the only source that we have for the study of ancient Mesopotamian law. So there are, in fact, contracts and legal documents issued by the parties in front of a judge. We have letters talking about it. There are some quite remarkable ones. There's one by a contemporary of Hammurabi that says, because he has thrown the young boy into the fire, you should throw him into the kiln. Ana Utunim Idia so this is a king issue in the judgment on a topic whose background we don't know. Now, the Whole system of law. Discussions of it, you'll notice, often tend to be one source thick, as it were. So people make a point and then they say, and here's the one piece of evidence we have for this point. And we're waiting for more evidence to emerge. But there were judges who weren't necessarily full time judges. They could be governors or administrators. So you'd have a plaintiff who had a problem, you'd go before the judges who would decide whether to take it forward. Then the two sides would go and present their evidence and the judges would adjudicate, and ultimately you could appeal to the king. There were all sorts of what to modern students looked like cool refinements, but to the lives of these people could have been terrifying experiences like the River Ordeal. There was also the whole business of swearing an oath. Now, because Mesopotamia was a society in which gods were taken very seriously, seriously, it looks like swearing an oath was a very serious thing to do. And there's one document published by Edzart in 1976 where somebody actually refuses to swear an oath in front of the gods.
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Melvyn Bragg
Can you just describe to us the River Ordeal that you mentioned?
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Martin Worthington
The River Ordeal? Well, if you go to Hammurabbey Law 2 that talks about witchcraft, if someone accuses someone else of witchcraft, what do you do? It's very hard to prove or disprove. And so you go to the river and it says, naar or Id Ishalli Amma. They shall go into the river. And then if the river Utebaashu clears him and Ixthalmam he comes out healthily, then all is fine. But if the river either drowns him or says that he's guilty, then he'll be put to death. Now, what this means in practice is known to some extent from letters from the city of Mari. Mari was one of those kingdoms Hammurabi hoovered up. And very conveniently, his destruction of the royal palace fossilized the archives for all time. So now we can go and read all these thousands of letters about social history and everybody saying how awful Hammurabi is and he was an enemy. And there are several Mori letters that talk about the River Ordeal. So it looks like maybe you had to carry a millstone to make the crossing more difficult, and there would have been witnesses. But it's better than medieval England.
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Melvyn Bragg
So basically, if you survive, you're innocent.
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Martin Worthington
It's better than medieval England, which was if you survived, you were guilty. Like the whole business of ducking the poor ladies called witches. But in Mesopotamia, if you survive, you're More or less innocent, yes.
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Melvyn Bragg
Right. Despite the fact that you're having to swim with a millstone around your neck, which must have been pretty challenging. I'm interested in the number of laws I read about agriculture and about cultivators. Was this because. Well, I presume for Hammurabi, successful agriculture was the economic basis of his. Of his power.
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Martin Worthington
It's very interesting. The law code doesn't say everything that you'd expect a comprehensive law code to say. Legally minded friends tell me that even today in Britain, there isn't a law that says that murder is illegal. There are a load of judicial cases that take that for granted and make that into law, but there isn't actually an original statute that says that. So Hammurabi himself doesn't say that murder is illegal, but he implies it in various ways and he goes and covers all the various parts of society. So adoption, inheritance, accidents, previous bodily harm, and of course, agriculture, which, as you say, was the mainstay of life in ancient Mesopotamia, apart from military conquest. And one thing I really like about the agricultural laws is that a lot of the things are kind of obvious. You know, okay, if a physician performs an operation on someone badly, then they'll be punished. Well, I get that that's kind of obvious. But for example, supposing I rent a field from you and then the weather God comes and blows away all my crop or all the seeds I've planted. Well, whose problem is that? And that's not so obvious. That's where the cultural construction of law comes in. And actually, in this particular case, the code says that the person who rented the field will bear the problem, not the owner. But these are the kind of things that people had to engage with.
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Melvyn Bragg
Fran Reynolds there's something striking about the way the laws are set out. They all begin with if, or most of them begin with if. If this happens, then this will be the consequence. Do we know why they follow that set pattern?
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Well, it's an interesting phenomenon because it's a very common type of construction in Mesopotamia. So we find huge recordings, lists of omens which are phrased in exactly the same way. You know, if Mars is red, there will be a war. All sorts of omens about the natural world, also medical omens. So in a sense, the interest here is in the connection between the event and then the consequence. So in a legal situation, you can see how, you know, if this offense takes place, this will be the punishment. But the idea is also that the gods are actually responsible for all these connections between cause and outcome. So when we think about the huge body of Roman literature in Mesopotamia, which is vast. The idea is that anything that happens in the natural world or in human activity is actually a message from the gods. It's just a question of whether you can understand what the message is telling you or not. Now, of course, omens could be something that just happens. I mean, we can also say if a black cat crosses your path, you'll be lucky. You know, you haven't orchestrated the cat to be in position. It just happens naturally. But also, of course, you can deliberately generate an omen. So, for example, they practiced ecstasy, actually looking at the innards of sacrificed sheep, particularly the liver. And they could also incubate dreams. So either an omen could happen spontaneously or it could be generated. Now, particularly, they were interested in looking at the night sky, so by looking at heavenly bodies and what they were doing or were perceived to be doing, this was a rich source of information about the future. So, for example, if the moon went dark in the sign of the lion, which is our Leo, because most of the constellations we talk about are actually Babylonian in origin, if that happens, then a king will die and lions will go wild. So you can see there's a nice connection between the lion constellation and then the outcome of these lions being on the rampage.
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Melvyn Bragg
Selina, who interpreted the omens?
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Selina Wisnam
Well, you had to be very highly trained to understand this. This is a very academic pursuit, because you can have up to 10,000 possibilities just to understand the omens of a sacrificial animal alone, to understand what all these little signs on the liver meaning. So there are people who. I like to call them sort of divine translators, as Fran said, these are messages from the gods that people are reading. And you have to understand the logic and the special codes that the gods are speaking in in order to do that. So the kings would employ a lot of these diviners to help him make all kinds of decisions, whether to go to war, which advisors he should trust, and so on.
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Melvyn Bragg
So was the reading of omens, and the message is essentially an elite phenomenon, or was everyone ordinary people, looking for omens every day as well?
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Selina Wisnam
It all depends on how much money you have, what options are available to you. Right? So, I mean, sacrificing a sheep is something that costs quite a lot of money. But you can also sacrifice a pigeon or a dove if you have less money. If you can't afford a pigeon, then you can also just pour flour out and watch how the cracks appear in the piles of flour that are being made.
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- [21:13]
Martin Worthington
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Melvyn Bragg
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Melvyn Bragg
to get back to the laws themselves, we have perhaps one of the most famous one is an eye for an eye. I think they also have a separate law for teeth as well. Does this principle of equivalence apply throughout the code that is the punishment equals the crime or fits the crime each time?
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Selina Wisnam
It often appears, but not always and not always in the way that we would expect. So yes, if a man blinds the eye of another man, then he himself will be blinded. But that only applies if they are both of the upper class. If a man blinds the eye of an ordinary man, an upper class man blinding the eye of an ordinary man, then he has to pay a fine. And if he blinds the eye of a slave, then he has to pay in amount of money which equates to half the slave's value. So it entirely depends on the status of the people involved. In the case of crimes which result in some kind of financial loss, it often is pay up for the damage. So if you cut down your neighbour's date palm, then you have to pay to make up for it. But there are also lots of deterrents involved. So, for example, if you steal an ox from an ordinary person, you have to pay 10 times its value to deter people from doing that. But if you steal from the palace, you have to pay 30 times its value. If you can't afford to pay the fine at all, then you're killed. And if you steal anything at all from a temple, you're also killed, because stealing from the gods is the worst thing of all. So there are quite a few punishments in the code which are very harsh. Death is prescribed quite a lot of times for things like burglary, sheltering criminals, helping slaves escape, adultery, rape, all kinds of things. So there are different ways that these equivalences play out depending on the scenario.
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Melvyn Bragg
Franz Alena mentioned the different strata of society. What does the code tell us about social stratification in Hammurabi's time?
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Well, Selena's absolutely right, and you can see this clear gradation depending on the social status of either the person who commits the offence or the person who is the victim of the crime. So there are three main categories. There's the Akkadian word awilum, which is just the normal word for a man, but also means a free citizen, and they're basically the highest status group. Then the second category is the mushknum, that she means someone who bows down. And they're a type of retainer. They used to be attached more to the palace, but in the Old Babylonian period there was increasing privatization. So often these people were actually working for a private middleman or businessman.
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Melvyn Bragg
And were they effectively slaves?
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
No, they weren't. You know, they had certain rights and they would keep a percentage, for example, of the crops that they were growing, but then the rest would have to be surrendered, or they would have, in the old model, to do duty for the king, such as military service or perhaps canal dredging. And then, I'm afraid, at the bottom of the pile, as mentioned, was indeed the slave Wadam, the male slave, Amtam, the female one. And legally speaking, a slave couldn't be held liable. So in principle, if a slave committed the crime, it was the owner of the slave who had liability.
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Melvyn Bragg
Martin, the code anticipates problems with the judges who enforce these laws. This is hardly reassuring, is it, for another ordinary Babylonian?
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Martin Worthington
I think anybody from the legal profession who hears what I'm about to say will have a fit. But ultimately, any system of law, if described in sufficiently abstract terms is more or less the same, right? Because you have to have a system of rules that people more or less agree on. You have to have a way of making sure that people more or less know what they are. You have to have someone who decides whether rules are respected and then you have to have a way of enforcing it. But then if you're really clever, you also have to have a safeguard built in so the enforcement works. And Hammurabi recognises that judges could be corrupt or, you know, subject to all sorts of influences. And so he anticipates this and says that if a judgment issues a crooked verdict, then ush et boushu, they shall literally cause him to rise from his seat and he shall not sit again with the judges in judgment. So he's banished and he has to pay, I think, twelvefold the amount at issue. But, you know, Hammurabi's code is a very fascinating source because it mixes the obvious and the non obvious. So the judge is, you know, that sort of makes sense, but there are all sorts of things built into it where it gets less obvious. So, for example, as my colleagues pointed out, if a person from the upper class destroys the eye of a person from the upper class, their own eye is destroyed. But if take someone from a quote unquote lower class, then they give money. Now, how do you interpret this? One way of interpreting is, oh, well, the lower class is worth less and so, you know, keep the eye safe, just dish out the cash. But if you flip it around and you think of it from the point of view of the poorer person in the lower class, they might say, well, actually, what is it to me if you lose your eye, give me some dosh and then I can actually improve the quality of my life. So it can be quite hard to work out what's going on and whose point of view these things are crafted for. So the judges are a nice example where that doesn't apply. And we can be sure of exactly
- [27:22]
Melvyn Bragg
what's going on when you break into your beautiful Babylonian, as you have done one or two times so far. Are you speaking Akkadian or Babylonian, or what is the. What is the relationship between the two?
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Martin Worthington
Akkadian is today. I mean, the history of the nomenclature is very complicated. There was a time when people used Akkadian for what we now called Sumerian, but today Akkadian is Babylonian plus Assyrian plus Ebla ite. So Babylonian and Assyrian would be two varieties of Akkadian.
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Melvyn Bragg
Fran, we've talked a little bit about witchcraft. Women don't come up in the code very often, but they do have some rather surprising appearances. Can you tell us about that?
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
Yes. So there is also the ambiguity, of course, with this term a wheel, and whether the free citizen is including both men and women. People are still debating exactly what to whelan means, but some of the laws definitely concern women. So, for example, there's a law about a woman innkeeper, and if she basically has criminals conspiring in the inn and she doesn't take them off to the palace to be held to account, then unfortunately, the usual verdict in these laws, she will be put to death.
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Melvyn Bragg
She's put to death. She's put to death for not dubbing
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Francis Reynolds Shillito
somebody, for not turning them in. So, you know, and to put this in context, many of the laws end with the word Idaho. He or she will be put to death. But it's interesting as well that women traditionally did run inns, so this was seen as a sort of extension of the domestic sphere, of the kitchen, of cooking and providing food and drink for a family. In Gilgamesh, there's even a goddess who runs the inn at the edge of the world. We also do have laws concerning marriage and dowries, divorce, also laws about sexual crimes. Obviously, many of the laws in this concern women. Some of the laws we can see as perhaps a little bit more favourable towards women, some of them not. You know, it's a mixed bag and of course, we're always reading through the lens of our own time and culture. But, for example, if a man marries a wife and she then develops a disease called lachbom, we know it's a skin disease, we don't know what. But in that case, he's allowed to marry again, but he must provide for that wife and provide her with housing and the means to survive for the rest of her life.
- [29:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Selina, is the code really a sort of set of laws that were designed to be followed quite, quite rigidly, or is it more like a projection and assertion of Hammurabi's power?
- [30:00]
Selina Wisnam
Well, they are never cited as a precedent. Judges do not refer to them when they're justifying any of their decisions. So it's actually quite a mystery. What were they actually for? Some people say. Is it all just propaganda? I think not, because we have Hammurabi's letters and he does seem to follow some of the principles in the code, at least there's one example where somebody has written to him saying that their merchant, who has ransomed a soldier that they found abroad, brought him home. But now who's going to pay the ransom money. And Hammurabi says temple should pay for it. And that's exactly what is stipulated in one of his laws. So some people have argued, maybe this is a collection of judgments or his personal opinions. Maybe it's a bit like English case law in some senses, that this is a collection of examples, the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. These are not universal principles which are going to be followed in every case. But actually reality is very complex. And this could be more Hammurabi's vision of what a just society should look like. And it's interesting to note that the code would have stood in the courtyard of the temple of Shamash, God of justice. And that's where the judges meet. So when the judges are deciding the cases, they will see Hammurabi's stele there. It's there as a reminder, a bit like having a portrait of the king or queen up on the wall in some official capacity, and be reminded that, you know, this is the. The general sense of how justice should be conducted. But when it comes to details of individual cases, things can be different.
- [31:32]
Melvyn Bragg
And when he started to expand his territory militarily, is there evidence that, you know, when he took a city or a town, that he would impose the code on the newly conquered territory? Martin, do you know about that at all?
- [31:50]
Martin Worthington
We actually have almost the opposite. There is a letter where I think it's in Gosh Abb 9, where he tells the person he's writing to to adjudicate the case according to the law, Sha inanna ina Emutbalum, which now applies in the city of Emutbalum, implying A, that it's specific from one city to another, but potentially B, that now it might be like this, but later on I'm going to change it. So these sources, you know, when you really drill down and try and extract information from them, they can often end up being very treacherous.
- [32:21]
Melvyn Bragg
It's interesting because you've all three given us extraordinary detail about, you know, life, ordinary life, everyday life in Hammurabi's time. Where are you getting the evidence for that? What are the sources for those quotidian experiences?
- [32:38]
Martin Worthington
Thank you. And these are some of the things that I should have said at the start about Mesopotamia. You see, people have this idea that the further back you go in the past, the less evidence there is. So the story goes, we know everything about the Second World War. We know a lot about Julius Caesar, and before that there were the Egyptians and friends who we don't know very much. About, but that isn't true. So for Mesopotamia, there are hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets. They illustrate the most varied aspects of their writing. Now you have to read between the lines. Mesopotamians had the intention of not committing very much to writing. So actually one of the questions to
- [33:08]
Melvyn Bragg
ask about the intention, they didn't want to.
- [33:10]
Martin Worthington
Well, what I mean is that most things in Mesopotamia were left unwritten. So how to build a wall unwritten, most recipes unwritten, most information unwritten. So one of the questions about Hammurabbe is why is it one of the few things that actually got written down, this law cod. But when you take all the things you did write and you read between the lines, then the amount of information becomes incredible. So we actually know the names of Hammurabi's major administrators. For example, in the city of Sippar, we can reconstruct archives. And all over the world today, there are people who are doing this for a living and making new discoveries. It's fascinating.
- [33:43]
Melvyn Bragg
Right, so cuneiform then goes into disrepair. I mean, it disappears at some point. When is it rediscovered and how do people start interpreting it?
- [33:54]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Well, basically it becomes an unreadable and forgotten language for a long time. So cuneiform inscriptions can even be visible on the surface of the sites in Iraq. So like smashed up bricks that had inscriptions of kings. But certainly some of the earlier travelers in the area would argue that these were purely decorative. You know, they weren't even thinking of this as a way of recording language. So really the great age of decipherment is, is in the 19th century. So this is finally when these inscriptions get their voice back and people start to decipher. Now, admittedly, the sort of material that they're first using to decipher Akkadian and Rekino form is not material like our stele that we're talking about today. It tends to be much later from the first millennium. But this is really the time when, you know, these voices from the past become heard again. And as Martin has said, you know, the written record from ancient Mesopotamia is absolutely unparalleled with any other civilization or culture in antiquity. It's extraordinary the amount of material that we have.
- [34:57]
Melvyn Bragg
How many people were living in Babylonia at the time? Do we know?
- [35:01]
Martin Worthington
I think we don't, because there are really only three ways to access that kind of information. One is a census, one is working out how many people the land could support, and one is looking at physical remains of buildings and working out how many people could live the there the censuses we don't have the buildings we haven't all dug up. And if we had, we wouldn't know how many people live there per room anyway. And how many people land can support is a very difficult question. So I think we have to pass on that particular one.
- [35:30]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
I think Selena Raya can jump in there.
- [35:33]
Melvyn Bragg
You did mention. You did mention those letters, those documentation from Mari. I mean, that sounds like an extraordinary find.
- [35:40]
Martin Worthington
Oh, it crops up in an Agatha Christie novel, I think there's a passage where one of the archaeologists wanders down the street, quote, unquote, allowing his mind to dwell pleasantly on certain aspects of the Maori letters. And Agatha Christie was married to a Mesopotamian archaeologist. She may have been thinking of the letter where someone reported to the king of Mari, Hammurabi's sometime enemy, that a prophet had turned up at the city gate and devoured a raw lamb in front of the assembled elders to make the point, as Fran was explaining earlier, the ominous sign carrying an impact in the real world, because he was saying, there will be a devouring, that happens. And so he kind of illustrated this by devouring the live lamb. The Mari letters are fantastic.
- [36:21]
Selina Wisnam
I like one that talks about the river Ordeal and attests that this is something that really, really happened. People were sent to the river. There's one story where eight people were charged with going into the river over a dispute over some property. One old man, he swims across, he makes it out alive, then a woman goes in and she drowns. And then the others, they just all hold up their hands at that point and say, we admit it, the land is not ours. We relinquish all claim because they don't want the other women to die. People really died when they went to the river ordeal.
- [36:52]
Melvyn Bragg
So the river ordeal, I notice, is written in English with a capital O. Is that because was the Euphrates suddenly called the river Ordeal when witchcraft was around? Or why is that?
- [37:04]
Selina Wisnam
Well, it's referred to as the divine river in the cuneiform sources.
- [37:08]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Exactly. So it actually has a marker in front of the word for river that singles a God. So a sign that was originally a star, which is a marker of divinity. So, you know, the river ordeal was used in all sorts of different cases. So also, for example, in the law code, it's a collection of laws. It's used for a case of adultery. When you can't actually resolve the question of innocence or guilt with the evidence available to human judges, then you turn it over to the divine river God who is going to make the decision.
- [37:38]
Melvyn Bragg
Tough call. If it Comes your way, Selina. What about Hammurabi himself? Did he abide by his laws? Was he a just king?
- [37:48]
Selina Wisnam
I think he did follow the principles that he sets out in his code. These letters show that he gets really involved with individual cases and he gets involved with small details. Sometimes people accuse him of micromanaging, but you can also see that as really caring and attention to detail. Somebody writes to him, for example, saying that their son had disappeared eight years ago. They've been making offerings to him as if he were dead. And suddenly they find out that actually he was kidnapped as a slave in somebody else's house. He can't get him back. Every time he goes, they keep moving his location. So it's impossible he writes to the king about this. And the king sends people, he sends soldiers to go and and get him back. So really ordinary people could come to him when they had a problem and he would look into it.
- [38:33]
Melvyn Bragg
There seems to be a bit of a divide here about whether the laws actually were laws, because on the one hand you're saying that they were ignored a lot of the time and they weren't implemented. On the other hand, we have this evidence of these cases being brought successfully.
- [38:51]
Selina Wisnam
He cares about justice. I think that's the overriding principle. And the laws can't cover every example. But I mean, one of my favourite contradictions, which is another one of these great paradoxes, right? There is a law that says if somebody accepts something for safekeeping with no witnesses or no documents, then that man is a thief, he will be killed. But later on in the law code, there is a law that says if somebody gives something to somebody for safekeeping with no witnesses and no documents, then he has no basis for a claim to get it back. Nothing about killing anybody involved. There is clearly not a universal principle that is applied strictly in every case. So why is there a contradiction? And I think if you look at the context in which these laws appear, it's quite interesting because the first one is in a series of provisions which is all about misconduct of justice, making sure judges do not go back on their word, consequences of theft. And the other one is in a sequence of cases about what happens if you deposit something in somebody else's granary and then it goes missing for some reason. If somebody is siphoning it off, then they will be punished. But what is common to both of those cases is that it's about establishing proper evidence. And one is a worst case scenario from the point of view of somebody who accepts this property for safekeeping and one from the point of view of the person who's giving it, in both cases you have to have documents and witnesses, and that is the underlying principle that these laws are illustrating.
- [40:22]
Melvyn Bragg
Martin in the 19th century there was this surge of interest in Mesopotamia, even before the stele was discovered. What accounts for that fascination for Mesopotamia in the Victorian period?
- [40:37]
Martin Worthington
If I had to choose two words, I'd probably say Empire and the Bible. So the French dug wonderful stuff up and so the Brits said we want it too. So Austin Henry Layard, an adventurer, goes off extracted, canning ambassador in Constantinople, gives him money. So on the one hand, this is a way of a colonial power, you know, digging stuff out of the ground and. But also it's a connection to hoary antiquity. This is a time when geology is being discovered. So now the deep history of the world is coming to human awareness. Darwin's talking about evolution, so maybe the world isn't as old as the Bible says it is. On the other hand, the clay tablets are also telling us the story of Noah. So does this prove that the Bible is a collection of Mesopotamian fairy tales? Is it independent vindication of the biblical account? So to Victorians, Mesopotamia. And also there's the whole national nationalist dimension to the decipherment. As Fran said, the decipherment was actually done by very clever Irishman Edward Hinks, but then the credit went to a British major general. And so for 100 years the history books all said, ah, you know, British major general deciphers cuneiform. And Gilbert and Sullivan and the Pirates of Penzance glorify his ability to write shopping list in Babylonic cuneiform. But I think that that was sustained at the time by factors which may be of less interest to us. But in the meantime, other things have taken over. I mean, the code of Hammurabi is part of a larger textual universe in Mesopotamia. So there are law codes before Hammurabbey, it's not the earliest law code. And then there was a tradition of commentary. So there are tablets that have extracts with headings, which is a very human thing to do. As fellow explained, sometimes a group of laws seem to fall into a sort of thematic headings and people actually go and write the headings in, just like us. But then going back to the River Ordeal, there's a very late commentary of fragments of clay, maybe 3 cm wide, which is a commentary on the Lord of Hammerabi. And it says that the God of the River Ordeal is the God Ea, the God of fresh water. And so there's always wheels within wealds and interpretations within interpretations. And part of the fascination of assyriology today is our ability to unpack these things and bring them back to life and make them special.
- [42:33]
Melvyn Bragg
Fran, we're getting towards the end, but tell us what happens to Hammurabi's kingdom after he dies?
- [42:40]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
We can see a really marked trajectory, because in a sense, the reign of Hammurabi marks the peak of power of this first entity of Babylon. You know, he conquers this huge area of territory, as we heard about in the prologue. He's an extremely able king. After his death, there are five successors, and the dynasty does continue for about another 155 years, but basically this sort of step downwards in terms of decline. So I think, in a sense, even during his reign, there was a weakness in the system with all this privatization, outsourcing. There was a move towards more of a gig economy. There was a real problem with debt burden. That was not a healthy aspect of society. Then, after his death, we find that his son as successor is actually struggling with rebellions in the south of Babylon. So there's political unrest in the south. There's a very powerful kingdom of Sealand, about which we now know more thanks to some relatively recent texts. And we find as well that the south, then is largely abandoned. So there's this extraordinary shift of people from the traditional cities in the south up into northern Babylonia. So really famous, prestigious Mesopotamian cities like Nippur and Ur are basically abandoned.
- [43:57]
Melvyn Bragg
And we see references, Selina, to the code of Hammurabi for the next thousand years or so, as I understand. But more recently, there's this other part of his legacy he's memorialized in the US Capitol and in the International Court of Justice. Why is he seen as such an important figure in modern law?
- [44:18]
Selina Wisnam
There are many similarities between the lords of Hammurabi and the laws in the Bible. And so this puts Hammurabi in the line of tradition of a culture that people are already familiar with, which is Moses as a great lawgiver. So in that sense, he slots quite neatly into one of these stories of the development of law worldwide. So that's why I think he became very well known when he was first discovered and why it meant a lot to people today.
- [44:47]
Melvyn Bragg
My thanks to Fran Reynolds, Selina Wisnam and Martin Worthington. Next week, A thing of beauty is a joy forever. We'll be discussing the romantic poet John Keats. Thanks for listening.
- [45:00]
Jenny Kleeman
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his Guests.
- [45:09]
Melvyn Bragg
What did we miss out? Fran? What did we miss out?
- [45:13]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
I wouldn't say we missed out, but something I think is very interesting and turns out of the use of the laws is that they're very commonly the first texts that students read when they're learning Akkadian. So students studying Akkadian all over the world, often the first thing they will read is law 1. Shuma Owlam Owilam Netam edima. If a man accuses another man of murder. So this is another afterlife of Hammurabi. It's actually is a text which is used today for teaching just while we're
- [45:45]
Melvyn Bragg
talking about the language. How do you reconstruct a language which disappears for millennia and then reappears in cune form? How do you know how it's pronounced? What's an A? What's a W? What's an L?
- [46:01]
Martin Worthington
So the short answer is that Babylonian and Assyrian are related to Hebrew and Arabic. So they're Semitic languages, Semitic languages. And the sounds of Semitic languages tend to be a lot more stable than those of Indo European ones. Then we have transcriptions into Hebrew and Greek letters occasionally and patterns of spelling. If you look how this sound is spelt under these conditions and spelled under those conditions, you can work out if it's A or a glottal stop or a W or a M. The long answer is very long.
- [46:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Okay, we won't go for the long answer, but tell me, Martin, what we. What we missed out.
- [46:33]
Martin Worthington
Do you know, I think it's. When I look at the stele, I always think it looks to me like an admonishing finger. And I don't know if that's a coincidence because actually in Babylonian culture, to stretch out the finger is something not very good. So maybe that's not something Hammurabi would have wanted to do. So maybe it's just a complete coincidence. What else? Well, when Fran and I were fortunate enough to talk on this program about Gilgamesh, I actually ran into someone who said he listened to the show and really enjoyed the show. So he went and read Gilgamesh and got a massive headache and sort of ran away crying. And I thought, well, maybe something that we should have built into the show at the time was to explain that these were compositions meant for intensive readers who would read the same thing over and over again and appreciate all sorts of subtleties that the first time reader just plowing through it once doesn't really pick up on. So maybe we should have prepared someone. So with Hammer Abbey, there's a similar point which is Aspects of it seem to be self explanatory, but there are so many problems and questions nestling among the folds of it that you really want to read it with a commentary or with a seriological guidance to make it safe.
- [47:41]
Melvyn Bragg
Selina, what about you? What would you have liked to have added?
- [47:45]
Selina Wisnam
I've got two short things, if I may.
- [47:46]
Melvyn Bragg
You may.
- [47:47]
Selina Wisnam
So the first law, I think is actually quite important. If a man accuses another man of murder but cannot prove it, that man will be killed. That is a very radical departure from how other law codes previously were, were stating things before. If a man commits murder, he will be killed. Okay, fine, but Hammurabi is really stating, do not go around making false accusations that you cannot prove unless you are very, very sure. So right from the beginning he's making a strong statement about a commitment to justice, which is different from what has gone before.
- [48:19]
Melvyn Bragg
And your second point, and my second
- [48:21]
Selina Wisnam
point is one of my favourite underrated laws is one that stipulates how much people pay for medical treatment. And ordinary people pay half the amount that the elite pay for their medical treatment.
- [48:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, that sounds quite.
- [48:33]
Selina Wisnam
Isn't that nice?
- [48:34]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes, it is.
- [48:35]
Martin Worthington
Can I slip in one more thing?
- [48:37]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes.
- [48:37]
Martin Worthington
So in 1898, Bruno Meissner wrote a paper with the dribs and drabs of tablets that we now know to be copies of Hammer Abbey and the British Museum Museum saying, oh, you know, we've got all these laws. Presumably there was some kind of code. Well, they seem to be very old. The spelling is old. It's the kind of thing that that famous king of hoary days, Hammurabi might have written. And then three years later they find the steely of Hammurabi with Lorko. It must have been too good to be true.
- [49:06]
Melvyn Bragg
That's fantastic. Fram. One thing, of course, that, well, we mentioned it, but only alluded to it really is. It is these stories which we know from the Bible are, if not identical, then very similar to the stories from Mesopotamia. When that came out, did people begin to say, well, maybe the Bible's just pinched everything from the Mesopotamians?
- [49:32]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Well, in a sense, of course, when these sorts of compositions are being read in the 19th century, it presented an enormous intellectual and spiritual challenge to basically discover that on tablets that were much older than any of the biblical sources. You, for example, had an account of the Flood, the flood story in the Gilgamesh epic. It's not identical to the story of Noah, but there are enough points of similarity, including the release of birds, that I think it's clear that you're dealing with another version of the same thing. So in a way, the people who were initially working on this material, they ended up being really in the front line of intellectual debate of the day. This wasn't just sort of dusty scholars tucked away in their offices and nobody else was interested. This was kind of hot news. You know, you're getting coverage in the Illustrated London News.
- [50:22]
Melvyn Bragg
The Illustrated London News, presumably. Yes.
- [50:24]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
You know, it's quite galvanised society at the time. Quite shocking, really.
- [50:29]
Martin Worthington
Should we mention Barbel and Beeble?
- [50:31]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Go for it.
- [50:31]
Melvyn Bragg
Mention.
- [50:32]
Selina Wisnam
Oh.
- [50:33]
Martin Worthington
So I think it was in the 1920s. There's a very, very brilliant mind in assyriology, Friedrich Delitzsch. I mean, you have to understand that, you know, in German Academy at the time, these people were rock stars. So Friedrich Delitzsch actually gave a series of lectures called Babel und Bibel Babel and Bible, which was attended by Kaiser Wilhelm ii, which in the context of anti Semitism in the day, basically said that Hebrew culture is nothing but stolen from Babylon, etc, etc, and actually the Kaiser distanced himself and didn't attend the third lecture. So that was a very ugly chapter in the story.
- [51:04]
Melvyn Bragg
What, the Kaiser distanced himself because it was too anti Semitic by implication.
- [51:09]
Martin Worthington
So actually, I don't know if the Kaiser was offended by the anti Semitism as such, but of course, in the context of today, when people are very appreciative of the Hebrew Bible in concept of Christianity, I don't think the Kaiser appreciated the attack on the Hebrew Bible. KWA foundation of Christianity.
- [51:23]
Melvyn Bragg
Right, well, at that juncture, I think we can get Simon to come and offer us a commission of tea.
- [51:29]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Well, thank you so much.
- [51:31]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you very much indeed.
- [51:33]
Martin Worthington
So, ready for the tea ordeal?
- [51:35]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes, the tea ordeal.
- [51:36]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
How far do we have to swim?
- [51:41]
Melvyn Bragg
Tea for me.
- [51:43]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Tea would be wonderful, thank you.
- [51:45]
Selina Wisnam
Peppermint tea?
- [51:46]
Podcast Advertiser
Yes.
- [51:46]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Yeah, thank you, that'd be great.
- [51:47]
Martin Worthington
Water would be fantastic. Thank you very much.
- [51:49]
Francis Reynolds Shillito
Thank you.
- [51:50]
Jenny Kleeman
In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. What would you do if your deepest secrets were held to ransom? In 2020, every patient who had used a Finnish psychotherapy service called Vastamo had their therapy notes stolen and held to ransom by a faceless, remorseless hacker.
- [52:16]
Martin Worthington
It could be some extortionist gang from Eastern Europe, or it could be somebody living next door to.
- [52:22]
Jenny Kleeman
I'm Jenny Kleeman. Join me as I discover just how vulnerable our deepest secrets can be.
- [52:28]
Selina Wisnam
I think I'm going to have a
- [52:30]
Jenny Kleeman
heart attack from BBC Radio 4 and Intrigue. This is Ransom Man.
- [52:36]
Martin Worthington
Listen.
- [52:37]
Jenny Kleeman
First on BBC Sounds.