Carved onto a tall basalt stele around 1754 BCE, which ancient law code is famous for its detailed, status-based penalties and survives today as one of the most complete early legal texts?
- The Twelve Tables
- The Law of Manu
- The Justinian Code
- The Code of Hammurabi
Why D? And why not the others?
Correct answer: D. The Code of Hammurabi
This Babylonian king inscribed 282 laws covering trade, marriage, property, and personal injury onto a stele over two metres tall, with penalties that scaled according to the social rank of the people involved. The stele was found in 1901 at Susa, in modern-day Iran, far from Babylon itself, suggesting it had been carried off centuries later as war plunder by an Elamite king. The Roman legal text carved on tablets in the marketplace came roughly thirteen centuries afterward, in the mid-5th century BCE, and grew out of a very different, plebeian-versus-patrician political struggle. The Sanskrit legal treatise attributed to Manu was compiled even later and addressed duty and social order rather than a king's decreed statutes. The Byzantine emperor's great legal compilation was assembled in the 6th century CE, nearly 2,300 years after the Babylonian stele was carved.
Source: Britannica: Code of Hammurabi; Musée du Louvre (stele, discovered at Susa, 1901)