More on Hammurabi's Code: A Modern View

As you may already know, Ace went to visit King Hammurabi and find out some interesting facts about Hammurabi’s Code. He told you all about how it came to be. While Ace was in ancient Babylonia, I flew to modern Paris to see Hammurabi’s Code on display at the Louvre Museum. I am going to tell you a little more about it from a modern perspective, including comparing some of the ancient codes to modern laws. I will begin by telling you about Where Hammurabi’s code was discovered and when it was brought to Paris.

Hammurabi’s Code is written in Cuneiform and Akkadian. Gustave Jéquier discovered Hammurabi’s Code in 1901 in Khuzestan, Iran (ancient Susa, Elam) on an expedition led by Jacques de Morgan. In the same year, it was transported to the Louvre Museum in Paris. It is on display in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre Museum in Paris today.

There are a lot of interesting facts about Hammurabi’s Code. Did you know that Hammurabi’s Code is shaped like an index finger? Unlike most Mesopotamian documents, which are made of clay, Hammurabi’s code was made of stone, which was to make it seem as though the laws were given to Hammurabi by the sun god, Shamash. There are 44 columns of text and 28 paragraphs. The entire code consists of 282 laws, but some Egyptologists believe that there were more that just rubbed off. There is no 13th law because back then (and still now) 13 was considered an unlucky and evil number.

Hammurabi's Code at Musée de Louvre (photo taken December 2011)

Many of the laws inscribed on Hammurabi’s Code are similar to many modern laws. One example is law number 14. Law 14 says that if anyone steals the minor son of another, he shall be put to death. That is very similar to the law in California. If you were to steal someone’s son today, it would be called kidnapping, which is a felony that carries a sentence of 5 years to life in prison. Law 22 states that if anyone is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death. That is similar to the modern California law stating that robbery is a felony, and depending on what is stolen, and how the crime is committed, each count can carry a sentence of from 3 to 9 years in prison. But some of the laws are very different. For example, law 17 says that if anyone finds runaway male or female slaves in the open country and brings them to their master, the master of the slaves shall pay him two shekels of silver. Today, slaves are no longer legal, due to the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in 1865.

Hammurabi’s Code was, and still is, a fascinating piece of history. It was the first known set of written laws ever to exist. On average, 12,000 people visit Hammurabi’s Code each day at the Louvre, which has over 8,000,000 visitors each year. The Louvre is the world’s most visited museum, with a record of 8.5 million people in 2008. One of the Louvre’s star attractions is Hammurabi’s Code, which has been standing since 1772 B.C.E. It has been in the Louvre since 1901 C.E. It was amazing to see something so important from history that is now over 3,000 years old.

What is something amazing that you have seen in a museum?

By Adele Wells

Sources Used:

U.S. Constitution, Amendment 13.

California Penal Code, Section 211-215.

California Penal Code, Section 207-210.

Spielvogel, Jackson J. Journey Across Time. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print.

Bauer, Susan Wise. The Story of the World. Virginia: Peace Hill Press, 2006. Print.

“The Code of Hammurabi.” The Avalon Project: Yale Law School. n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2012 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp

“History of the Louvre.” Musée de Louvre. n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2012

http://www.louvre.fr/en/history-louvre

“Hammurabi’s Code.” Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation Library. n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2012 http://library.thinkquest.org/20176/hammurabis_code.htm

“The Code of Hammurabi.” The Web Chronology Project. n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2012

http://www.thenagain.info/webchron/middleeast/hammurabicode.html

Hanging Out in the Hanging Gardens

I got the chance to travel back in time to 590 B.C. and meet Queen Amytis. I talked to her about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had married Amytis to create an alliance with Persia (modern Iraq). Amytis had been reluctant to marry a stranger, but her father, the king of Persia, convinced her to help keep her country safe from invasion. The gardens were a gift to her from her new husband. I asked her if I could see them. I told her that sometime in the future archeologists might want to find them. She did not like the idea of her gardens being excavated. So that I would not know the location of her special garden, she insisted that I was blindfolded on our journey. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you where to look, but I can tell you what the gardens looked like. I recreated them as best as I could with LEGOs. Although we have no present-day tangible evidence of their existence, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon existed in ancient times.

The queen told me that when she first arrived in Babylon she was feeling extremely homesick. She longed to go back to her home in the mountains of Persia. King Nebuchadnezzar wanted her to feel better so he decided to build her a mountain with lush gardens in the flat land of Babylon. He declared that thousands of workers would help him haul slabs of rock from far away. When his workers were finished getting rocks, they realized that they didn’t have enough to build the whole mountain. The king had his workers mix clay with dried straw to make bricks for walls on the inside. The bricks were coated in lead to be waterproof so that the plants would hold water better. After the building was laid out, the king had plants put in. He ordered that each story have all kinds of vegetation to beautify the queen’s viewing experience.

Queen Amytis was so happy that the king had built her a terraced garden wonderland, she declared it the most exquisite place in the world. She was amazed at how each level hung down on to the next one. That is how the gardens got their name, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Every morning she would come out of the palace and look at the view of her beautiful mountain from her palace balcony. The gardens brought a little bit of Persia to the queen, and quelled her homesickness. The king went to a lot of trouble to make sure of that.

The queen told me a lot about the vast size of the gardens, and from what I could see at the time, I think she was correct. It has been reported that the gardens were over 320 feet tall, and they did look about as high as a football field to me. (Some historians think they were as high as four football fields.) The gardens were also quite wide. “They were wide enough for two four horse carriages too pass each other,” wrote a Greek historian named Herodotus from 450 BCE. I was amazed at how lush the plants appeared. Queen Amytis explained how her plants were watered, and that her husband came up with the watering system. The water was carried from the Euphrates River to the top of the gardens using a chain pump. The gardens were truly a work of inspiration and genius.

Although no visible remains exist today, there is poetry and other written accounts of the gardens from that time period. Additionally, some archaeologists have found sites that could have been where the gardens had been located. I learned from Queen Amytis that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon really did exist, and that they were a very special gift to her. It seems to me that the king’s gift to her served its purpose, and was so great that we are still fascinated today. In fact, not only were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon pleasing to Queen Amytis, they were so amazing as to be named one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the Ancient World.

By: Adele Wells

Sources used:

"Mesopotamia." The British Museum. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2011

http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/

"Hanging Gardens of Babylon." The Museum of Unnatural Mystery. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2011

http://www.unmuseum.org/hangg.htm

Spielvogel, Jackson J. Journey Across Time. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print.

Bauer, Susan Wise. The Story of the World. Virginia: Peace Hill Press, 2006. Print.

(Chain pump picture courtesy of Google Images.)

Pottery and Cuneiform in Ancient Mespotamia!

After Adele went back to 10,000 B.C. to the area that would become Mesopotamia, we decided to go back. We went back to 3,000 B.C. because we wanted to see Mesopotamia when writing was forming and pottery was being made. We were particularly interested in writing because we are time travel journalists. We also got interested in learning more about ancient pottery when Gary Rith left an informative comment on Adele’s post. We went to the city-state of Ur, which was the capitol of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. Ur was located on the Euphrates River. We got to see Sumerian pottery and clay tablets. The most exciting part is that they let us learn how they made pots and write on tablets in cuneiform. We brought back some samples.

Adele's Cuneiform Tablet

Cuneiform is one of the earliest known forms of writing. It originated in Sumer around 3100 B.C. In its first stages, cuneiform writing was based on pictographs, but for functional reasons, they changed to straight lines. As the pictographs changed into symbols made from straight lines, over time they lost their original resemblance to the objects they represented. Numbers were represented by repeated strokes or circles. In order to write in cuneiform, a reed stick or stylus was used to make impressions in clay.

At first every character represented one word, but many words lacked their own symbols. For these, symbols of related objects were used. In the beginning, cuneiform was written from top to bottom. Then they changed into writing from left to right because their arm would smear the written words below. The signs also changed to being turned on their sides. There were 600 signs in the fully developed cuneiform system.

Ace's Tablet (from L to R):
Fish, Heaven, Water,
Sun, Bird, Barley,
Bread, Day, Hand,
To Walk, Head, Mountain,
Man, Ox, "Ace"

Thank you, Ace, for that wonderful information about cuneiform writing. I have some things to say about pottery! The ancient pottery of Mesopotamia was a lot different than most people think. Some people think that decorations or writing was painted, but most historians know that it was usually etched like this:

Adele's Pottery Etched with a Bird Symbol

Decorating or marking pots with paint may have dated back to around 5,000 B.C. However, when Ace and I were in Ur in 3,000 B.C., they mostly used engravings. Only their ceremonial pots had paintings. Examples of ceremonial pots included their urns. We saw pots engraved with the symbol for crops; for example, the barley symbol might be on a pot that was made to contain that grain. Barley and wheat were grains common to that time and region. Some pots do not even have engravings.

Ace's Pottery

Although the Sumerians had pottery wheels by this time, the pots that we made were coil pots. A coil pot in progress looks like this:

Coil Pot Example

Ace and I had so much fun in the city-state of Ur. Something else we learned about in Ur is that only wealthy boys could go to school. We also got to visit a ziggurat. In Sumer, ziggurats were temples dedicated to the city-state’s most important god or goddess. The one in Ur was the temple of Nanna, the moon deity in Sumerian mythology.

Ace and I had to hurry back home because we saw our Mac battery levels were running low. We did not want to get stuck in the past like Marty McFly. We grabbed our tablets and pottery, and clicked our time portal links. We are looking forward to our next adventure. Meanwhile, do you have any questions about Mesopotamia?

By: Ace and Adele Wells

Sources Used:

"Mesopotamia." The British Museum. n.d. Web. 27 September 2011
"Cuneiform Writing." LookLex Encyclopedia. n.d. Web. 27 September 2011
(Coil Pot photo courtesy of Google Images.)