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Hammurabi's Code of Laws (ca. 1780 BCE)

Following a genealogy of the royal lineage of Hammurabi, a list of some 282 laws make up the Babylonian kingdom's judicial code. Among these laws are the familiar prescriptions of bodily injuries as atonement for various crimes (e.g., an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth).

Code of Laws

Battery

  • If a son strike his father, they shall cut off his fingers.
  • If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.
  • If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone.
  • If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman, he shall pay one mina of silver.
  • If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price.
  • If a man knock out a tooth of a man of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth.
  • If one knock out the tooth of a freeman, he shall pay one-third mina of silver.
  • If a man strike the person of a man (i.e., commit an assault) who is his superior, he shall receive sixty strokes with an ox-tail whip in public.
  • If a man strike another man of his own rank, he shall pay one mina of silver.
  • If a man strike a man's daughter and bring about a miscarriage, he shall pay ten shekels of silver for her miscarriage.
  • If that woman die, they shall put his daughter to death.
  • If, through a stroke, he bring about a miscarriage to the daughter of a freeman, he shall pay five shekels of silver.
  • If that woman die, he shall pay one-half mina of silver.

Physicians

  • If a physician operate on a man for a severe wound (or make a severe wound upon a man) with a bronze lancet and save the man's life; or if he open an abscess (in the eye) of a man with a bronze lancet and save that man's eye, he shall receive ten shekels of silver (as his fee).
  • If he be a freeman, he shall receive five shekels.
  • If it be a man's slave, the owner of the slave shall give two shekels of silver to the physician.
  • If a physician operate on a man for a severe wound with a bronze lancet and cause the man's death; or open an abscess (in the eye) of a man with a bronze lancet and destroy the man's eye, they shall cut off his fingers.
  • If a physician set a broken bone for a man or cure his diseased bowels, the patient shall give five shekels of silver to the physician.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412950510.n838
10.4135/9781412950510.n838
Harper, Robert Francis, trans. 1904The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, About 2250 B.C., 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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