190 1 1 In February, an archaeological team composed of French and Iranians excavated the ruins of an ancient city named Susa in southwest Iran. One day, they found a black basalt, and a few days later, they found two more. They put three pieces together, which happened to be an oval cylindrical stone tablet.

This stone tablet is 2.25m high, with a circumference of1.9m at the bottom and1.65m at the top. In the exquisite relief in the first half of the stone tablet, Chamakh, the sun god worshipped by the Babylonians, sat on the throne, and Hammurabi, king of the Babylonian kingdom, stood respectfully in front of it. Chamakh gave Hammurabi the symbol of imperial power. The whole relief picture is solemn and steady, showing the concept of "divine right of monarch". The lower part of the stone tablet is engraved with the code formulated by Hammurabi, written in cuneiform, and several of them have been polished.

This stone tablet is the famous code of hammurabi and the earliest systematic code in the world. It brought us to the ancient Babylonian society nearly 4000 years ago.

In BC 1762, Hammurabi (Amorite) became king of Babylon. Hammurabi was a very talented king. He is diligent in state affairs and cares about the development of agriculture, commerce and animal husbandry. His 43-year rule made Babylon a powerful country. Hammurabi has too many appeals to deal with every day, which is simply beyond his ability. He asked his lieutenants to collect some past legal provisions and codify them with the habits that have been formed in society. Hammurabi ordered the code to be carved on a stone pillar and erected in the templo mayor of Babylonia.

Code of hammurabi is divided into three parts: preface, text and conclusion. There are 282 articles in the text, including litigation procedure, theft handling, tenancy, employment, commercial usury and debt, marriage, inheritance and slave status. Code of hammurabi fully reflected the social situation at that time. In Babylonian society, besides slave owners and slaves, there were freemen. Many provisions in this code are used to deal with the internal relations of freemen. The principle of treatment is "a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye". For example, two free men fight, one is blind in one eye and the other is blind in the same eye as compensation; If someone breaks his leg, you should also break the other person's leg; If someone knocks out their teeth, they have to knock out their teeth. There is even a presumption that if the house collapses, it will crush the owner's son. Then, the person who built this house has to pay for his son.

In order to consolidate the rule of slave owners, the code also stipulates some stricter provisions: all those who evade military service shall be put to death; Those who destroy bridge water conservancy will be severely punished or even executed; Anyone who helps a slave escape or hides an escaped slave shall be sentenced to death; If the lawbreaker conspires in the hotel, if he is not arrested, the owner will be put to death. Free men in Babylonian society also included small farmers who rented land. They were also seriously exploited by slave owners, who paid 1/3 or even 1/2 of the harvest to the slave owners who rented the land every year. The code also stipulates that debt slaves can be free after three years of labor. But this is only a small favor for free people. Slave owners forced some freemen who could not pay their debts to become debt slaves, and in turn used this rule to win them over.

It was by relying on this code that Babylonian society in Hammurabi's time became the most tightly ruled country among the ancient eastern slave countries.