Hammurabi's code was not the first.
The laws of Ur-Nammu of Ur are some 300 years older, and instead of 'an eye for an eye' they set money fines for bodily injury.
The events
- Code of Hammurabic. 1754 BC · Babylon. King Hammurabi of Babylon had 282 laws on trade, family, property and punishment carved on a basalt stele. It is one of the oldest and most complete written legal codes in history.
- Great Ziggurat of Urc. 2100 BC · Ur. King Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, built a stepped temple tower to the moon god Nanna. It symbolised the Sumerian revival and is one of the best-preserved monuments of Mesopotamia.
21st century BC · 18th century BC
More amazing facts
- 2200 BC Around 2200 BC a single drought may have hit three civilisations at once.
- 2100 BC The first king in the Sumerian King List ruled for 28,800 years.
- 2100 BC East Asia's oldest observatory is about 4,000 years old. At Taosi in China, slots in an ancient structure seem to have framed the sunrise on the solstices, helping keep a solar calendar.
- 2100 BC The war chariot was probably invented not in Egypt or Mesopotamia but in the southern Urals.
- 2000 BC The oldest known noodles are about 4,000 years old. The thin yellow strands were found in 2005 in an upturned pot at Lajia on the Yellow River, a village buried by mudflows.
- 2000 BC At Dholavira in India archaeologists found a three-metre 'signboard' of ten Indus signs — and no one can read it. The Indus script is still undeciphered: not a single bilingual inscription has been found.