Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC) was king of Babylonia, and the greatest ruler in the first Babylonian dynasty in Mesopotamia. After consolidating his gains under a central government at Babylon, he devoted his energies to protecting his frontiers and fostering the internal prosperity of the empire. He is credited with uniting most of this area under one extensive empire for the first time since Sargon of Akkad did so in about 2300 BC. To do this, Hammurabi waged several military campaigns. The purpose of most of his operations was to gain control of the Tigris and Euphrates waters, on which agricultural productivity depended.
Hammurabi effected great changes mostly from the transformation of a small city-state into a large empire. Most of his rule was given to the establishment of law and order, religious buildings, irrigation projects, and defense works. He personally oversaw the administration of government. In doing so he failed to create a permanent bureaucratic system. Throughout his long reign, he personally supervised navigation, irrigation, agriculture, tax collection, and many temples and other buildings.
Hammurabi sought to maintain his empire by providing it with a code of law. They were a combination of Sumerian rulers who had promulgated laws and Hammurabi borrowed these laws to compile them to create the most elaborate and complete Mesopotamian law code. He proclaimed himself to have been chosen by the gods to promote the welfare to the people. His laws established high standards of behavior and stern punishments to violators. They prescribed death penalties for murder, theft, fraud, false accusations, sheltering of runaway slaves, failure to obey orders, etc. The code relied on the principal lex italtionis, the “law of retaliation” where offenders suffered punishments resembling their violations. But the code also took account of the social standard when applying this principle. Hammurabi’s laws established a set of common standards that lent a degree of cultural unity for the Babylonian empire.
