"The Code Of Hammurabi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Johns Rev Claude Hermann Walter)

2500 BC
The Code of Hammurabi
Translated by L. W. King
With commentary from
Charles F. Horne, Ph.D. (1915)
and
The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910-
by the Rev. Claude Hermann Walter Johns, M.A. Litt.D.
The Code of Hammurabi

Introduction
Charles F. Horne, Ph.D.
1915

. . .[Hammurabi] was the ruler who chiefly established the greatness
of Babylon, the world's first metropolis. Many relics of Hammurabi's
reign ([1795-1750 BC]) have been preserved, and today we can study
this remarkable King . . . as a wise law-giver in his celebrated code. . .

. . . [B]y far the most remarkable of the Hammurabi records is his
code of laws, the earliest-known example of a ruler proclaiming
publicly to his people an entire body of laws, arranged in orderly
groups, so that all men might read and know what was required of them.
The code was carved upon a black stone monument, eight feet high,
and clearly intended to be reared in public view. This noted stone was
found in the year 1901, not in Babylon, but in a city of the Persian
mountains, to which some later conqueror must have carried it in
triumph. It begins and ends with addresses to the gods. Even a law
code was in those days regarded as a subject for prayer, though the
prayers here are chiefly cursings of whoever shall neglect or
destroy the law.
The code then regulates in clear and definite strokes the
organization of society. The judge who blunders in a law case is to be
expelled from his judgeship forever, and heavily fined. The witness
who testifies falsely is to be slain. Indeed, all the heavier crimes
are made punishable with death. Even if a man builds a house badly,
and it falls and kills the owner, the builder is to be slain. If the
owner's son was killed, then the builder's son is slain. We can see
where the Hebrews learned their law of "an eye for an eye." These grim
retaliatory punishments take no note of excuses or explanations, but
only of the fact--with one striking exception. An accused person was
allowed to cast himself into "the river," the Euphrates. Apparently
the art of swimming was unknown; for if the current bore him to the
shore alive he was declared innocent, if he drowned he was guilty.
So we learn that faith in the justice of the ruling gods was already
firmly, though somewhat childishly, established in the minds of men.
Yet even with this earliest set of laws, as with most things
Babylonian, we find ourselves dealing with the end of things rather
than the beginnings. Hammurabi's code was not really the earliest. The
preceding sets of laws have disappeared, but we have found several