Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 92

The Akkadian Empire lasted about two centuries, until tribes from the northeast overran it in 2112 BC. Urnammu, the Sumerian king of Ur, which had remained independent, ejected them about 50 years later and reunited Mesopotamia for another century, until a new wave of conquerors swept the Sumerian kings away forever. These centuries of turmoil produced no great art.

Finally, in 1792 BC, Babylon emerged as a great political and cultural power in southern Mesopotamia, under King Hammurabi, its greatest and most famous ruler. Art and Sumerian culture resurfaced. Hammurabi respected the Sumerian gods so much that he created a code of divinely ordained laws —the first detailed written law code in history — to help carry out their moral commands on earth. He wrote the code in cuneiform, the Sumerian script.

Like Moses, Hammurabi claimed to receive his law code directly from God. On the stele (a carved or inscribed upright stone slab used as a monument), Hammurabi meets the sun god Shamash, not on his knees like Moses, but standing, eye to eye. Under the image, Hammurabi writes a powerful introduction to the laws:

Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people [the Sumerians] like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.

Hammurabi’s law code prevented judges from arbitrarily handing down sentences based on personal bias. Nevertheless, many of the laws seem brutal to modern ears:

 If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off.

 If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.

 If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out [similar to the Hebrew “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” code].

In spite of its occasional severity, Hammurabi’s Code was the beginning of civil rights or, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence calls them, “inalienable rights.” Hammurabi must have known that writing the code in stone would make the laws last. (The expression “written in stone” derives from this practice.)