The Louvre museum is home to one of the oldest legal texts in History : the Code of Hammurabi. This stele was carved in Babylon, in present-day Iraq.
The two depicted characters are none other than Hammurabi, king of Babylon, on the left, and Shamash, god of the Sun, on the right. The sovereign is raising his hand as a sign of respect while the deity is handing him a stick and a ring, symbols of divine power.
Below them and all over the stele spread no fewer than 4,000 lines of text in cuneiform script. There are 282 precepts of law built according to the following model : “if someone commits such and such a fault, then they will be punished in such and such a way”. The author is the king of Babylon. We actually see him reciting them to Shamash.
The stele, made in many copies for the whole kingdom, was displayed for all to see, so that everyone could know what would happen to them depending on their situation.
