![]() ![]() ![]() The god wears the horned head-dress, symbolic of divine power, and he holds in his right hand the ring and staff, emblematic of sovereignty & dominion. On the upper part is a relief in which the king, standing in the traditional attitude of worship, with his right arm bared and raised, is represented in the act of receiving the laws from Shamash to Sun-god. "CAST OF A BASALT STELE inscribed in ancient Babylonian characters with the Text of the Code of Laws which was drawn up by Hammurabi, a king of the 1st dynasty of Babylon, about B.C. Others are displayed in the National Museum in Tehran (2001) and other collections.Ĭopy of former exhibition label on the plinth: Basmachi: 'Treasures of the Iraq Museum', Baghdad 1975, pp. A cast was formerly exhibited in the Babylonian Hall of the Iraq Museum (illustrated by F. The present cast is one of two coloured casts of this object in the BM (2004 the second is currently at Blythe House) the second was made by BMCo as a plaster piece mould used to exist of it and made by directly moulding the original cast. If the person killed was a slave, the murderer got away with a fine.įUN FACT: in the Code of Hammurabi, the so-called law of retaliation was also valid for the law concerning wine dishonest wine merchants were actually punished by being drowned in a river.A full account of the discovery, display and significance of the original stela is published by Beatrice Andre-Salvini, 'Le Code de Hammurabi', Musée du Louvre. ![]() If a nobleman's son was killed by another person of the same rank, he could avenge himself by killing the perpetrator's son in return. In short, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!"Įquality of the punishment only affected people of the same social level. The norm governing the majority of the laws is the so-called law of retaliation, in other words the right to inflict damage in equal measure on those who intentionally harm you. The content covers various areas of human coexistence and different categories of offenses. The text you see on the lower part is in cuneiform characters, drawn in a very elegant hand, and contains 282 laws subdivided into articles. As you can see, the two figures are portrayed in a rigid, square fashion, very "unnatural" and typical of Babylonian art which aimed at portraying scenes and characters that were easy to recognize, with little concern to make them lifelike. The upright figure on the left is Hammurabi himself, symbolically receiving the laws from the sun god Shamash, the patron of Justice, recognizable by the flames behind him. The stele is in two parts: in the upper part you can see two figures in relief, and in the lower part the text of the laws. In addition to transforming Babylon into a rich and famous capital for the whole of Mesopotamia, Hammurabi was the first sovereign who decided to convert rules formerly passed on through the oral tradition into an actual code of laws. Basalt is an extremely hard volcanic rock that's difficult to work, so the accuracy with which the legal code is engraved is even more staggering. It was engraved in Babylon, in what is now Iraq, around 1760 BC, and was returned to the Iranian city about 3,000 years later as the spoils of war. Recovered at the beginning of the 20th century in Susa, in present-day Iran, the stele is a large block of basalt over two meters high. You are in front of one of the most exciting works in the Louvre, the stele on which the so-called Code of Hammurabi - the earliest collection of written laws in the history of man - is engraved. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |