Makers of Civilization – The HAMMURABI (2288-2232 B.C.)

The man whose story is being told in this chapter lived a very long time ago. He lived near a river, the River Euphrates in the land which was after- wards known as Mesopotamia; but is marked on your maps now as Iraq. The name Mesopotamia means the land of two rivers, the River Tigris and the River Euphrates.

Hammurabi was one of the greatest kings who ever lived. When he became king he only reigned over a very small country and had very few subjects. But he was a man with many dreams in his head. He dreamed of being the ruler of a great people who would be happy and contented because they were well governed and who would be prosperous because they were at peace, which was a very rare thing in those days. So he set to work to make his dreams come true. He began by driving out a fierce tribe called the Elamites who were troubling his people from the land near the River Tigris, and so he made himself lord of Mesopotamia. Then he gradually pushed out towards the north and west to add land to his empire. But he did not make the people he conquered into slaves like most conquerors of his time. He allowed them to keep their own rulers, so long as they were willing to promise to be friends with his people and to keep him as their leader. Gradually he won huge lands for his empire. His land stretched westward to the Mediterranean Sea and northward to the Black Sea.

But we do not now remember Hammurabi mostly for his conquests though it took him thirty years to win all these lands. We remember him for the won- derful rule of the last twelve years of his reign when his lands were at peace. He thought of himself as the father of his people and he worked very hard to make them happy. We know about this because of some of his letters which have been found. They were not written on paper like the letters we write to-day. They were written on square tablets of clay. When the clay was soft the clerks would scratch the writing on them with a reed pen. Then they would sprinkle dry powdered clay on the tablet so that it would not stick, and wrap a wet clay envelope round it. After that they would send it to be baked hard in a furnace. Then it would be ready to be sent away.

Hammurabi did everything he could to make it possible for his people to trade safely. He started a postal system, the first in the world, so that they could write letters about their business and other matters. He also had police to protect his subjects from thieves, so that they and their goods could pass freely from place to place along the roads.
His land was a very hot one and the earth got so hard in the dry season that crops would not grow, so he built canals to carry the water from the rivers to the fields in order that the corn and other crops should not die. This was one of the things in which he was most interested, because he knew how important it was for the land. His letters are full of directions about how to keep this irrigation system in good order. It was the business of every man to take his part in looking after it.

He was interested in all the small personal prob- lems of his people, too. One of the letters that has been found was written to a baker who had been ordered to come to the palace to help bake for a great feast. He wrote and told the king that he had an im- portant lawsuit coming on about that time and Ham- murabi sent him an order to delay the lawsuit till after the feast. He cared about the farmers too, and he held a great sheep-shearing feast in Babylon, his capital city, to which all the officials had to come, to give thanks for the wool that was got from the backs of the sheep. He expected all the government officials to be very honest. One of his letters is about some of the palace gate-keepers. Someone had told him that they had been taking bribes and his letter sternly orders that they shall be dismissed at once. Hex severely punished tax-gatherers who kept back the money they had collected instead of sending it to the Treasury.
He was a religious man and he saw that the temples were looked after properly, that the temple property was protected and that the feasts and the worship of the gods were carried out properly. He built a great temple in Babylon in honour of Marduk, the sun- god.

But he is most famous of all as a lawgiver. He realized that if his people were to be happy and pros- perous they must have good laws and that everyone must know what the laws were. So he collected to- gether all the old laws of the different people over whom he ruled, and added some more of his own. He had all these laws carved on a great stone pillar which was set up in the court of the temple of Mar- duk in Babylon where everyone could see them. That pillar can still be seen. At the top is a picture of Hammurabi standing in front of the god Marduk and receiving the laws from him so that he might give them to his people.

These laws punished very severely people who were careless or unjust. One law said that if a builder built a house badly and it fell down and
killed the owner’s son, then the builder’s own son must be put to death. Another said that if a man owed money and could not pay the interest on it because of a bad har- vest, he should be allowed to put off paying the interest till the next year. The way in which women were to behave was carefully regulated. One of his laws runs like this: ‘If a woman has not been economi- cal, a goer-about, has wasted her house, that woman one shall throw into the waters.’ Hammurabi was very much interested in trade. He did all he could to extend it in his empire. He en- couraged the temples, which were very rich, to lend money to the merchants when they needed it. To make trade easier lumps of silver of a given weight were issued; coins were not invented until later. The goods that were bought and sold were carried on the backs of donkeys from one town to another, and each roll of cloth had on it a clay seal with the special sign of the merchant who sold it. Many of  these seals have been found and can be seen in museums.

For all this trade many clerks were needed and there were schools at some of the large temples where boys could be educated. One of these school houses was found buried underground and has been un- covered. It had four classrooms round a large central courtyard. Some of the clay tablets of the pupils have been found on which they learned to write. There were more than three hundred different signs in their writing so it took a long time to learn, but the people were very proud of being able to write. On one clay tablet has been found this proverb: ‘He who shall excel in tablet writing shall shine like the sun.’

Hammurabi kept a well-trained army to guard his empire from the wild mountain men who lived over the borders. So long as he was alive they were able to do this, but after his death his country became weak again, because the kings who came after him were not such good rulers. So the mountain men attacked the land and gradually conquered it. They had found out how to tame and ride horses so they could move about from place to place more quickly than Hammurabi’s people, who only had donkeys. But Hammurabi’s name will never be forgotten and people who came after him in many lands copied his laws and his good ways of government.

THINGS YOU CAN DO

1. Find in your atlases the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia.
2. Find in your atlases the Black Sea and the Mediter- ranean Sea.
3. Write out in your note-books the proverb Hammurabi’s people made about writing.
4. See how many of Hammurabi’s laws you can remember.

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