Hammurabi

On 5 December we commemorated the day when the right of women to vote and be elected was accepted in Turkey — a right that women in many countries obtained long after Turkey. In our country the law was accepted in 1934; in France in 1945, in Switzerland in 1971.

Today we live happily because we have laws that protect us. In antiquity the best-known law is the code of the king of Babylon, Hammurabi, who lived more than 3,800 years ago. His name means 'Great Family'. He wrote about labour contracts, landowners, family relations and much more. The 282 laws in all are engraved on a stele of diorite, in the Akkadian language, which was the lingua franca of that period. This 4-ton monument is in the Louvre museum in Paris, France. A tablet of the copies made in clay is in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, in the 'Ancient Orient' section.

What is interesting is that this monument was found in 1901 in Iran, in the region of Khuzestan, by Jacques de Morgan, a French mining engineer and archaeologist who wanted to excavate at Susa, the Elamite capital, 400 km from where Hammurabi lived.

Note that the law of Hammurabi is not the oldest law in the world, as many believe, because there are laws called those of 'Ur-Nammu' in Mesopotamia that were engraved more than 4,000 years ago. Some of Hammurabi's laws resemble those of the Torah. And many laws are of the category of 'laws of vengeance', such as 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'. There are also progressive laws, such as the one giving the suspect the right to be innocent before being accused of his fault or crime. Another law says that if a married woman dies, the dowry she brought goes only to her children. At the beginning of the monument it is written that these laws were made to protect the oppressed from the violence of the strong and to protect the widow and the orphan. Even so, the code favours the man much more than the woman: a man's adultery is not counted a crime, while a woman's adultery ends with her execution.

Luckily today the law of vengeance is hardly seen in any country, but there are places where vengeance is taken directly, by killing, without going through justice, and there are places where justice arrives so late that it makes us say, 'better than nothing'.

The best thing is always to have a clean and clear conscience.