preview

Hammurabi Code Dbq

Decent Essays

Hammurabi’s Code, c. 1800 B.C.E. Author: Hammurabi was a Babylonian King who made 300 laws to organize and justify society. His codes were both divine and secular, which more often than not determined the punishments for breaking such laws. Audience: Everyone in Babylon was held accountable in these law codes. Hammurabi distinguished social classes in these laws, and it is clear that the severity of punishments was also determined by where a person stood in society. Considering that only a fraction of Babylonian society could read, and the people who could read were usually the upper class, perhaps not all Babylonians knew that their actions could suffer strict consequences. Argument: Laws are created to distinguish a societal order. …show more content…

Plus, this document shows how human organizations have adapted and evolved to create the modern society. In the modern world, a person’s punishment for breaking a Hammurabi Law is jail time or a lifetime’s duty, whereas Hammurabi’s punishment may be a sentence to death. The evolution of penalty allows room for a question: What happened to society throughout thousands of years to allow such change for a person’s consequence in accordance with the …show more content…

Hammurabi’s Code first implied a woman’s role in marriage, but Assyrian Law directly controls how women are perceived in society with a physical but symbolic cloth. The cloth represents a woman’s sexuality and virginity, as if women were reproductive machines. The Palace Decree is valuable because it shows a rare insight into the lives of upper-class men who weren’t kings, but instead the workers of the King. By castration, men in the palace had proved their lifetime willingness and fidelity to the hierarchy. ______________________________________________________________________________ The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, c. 1850 B.C.E. Author: Egyptians would write down court cases and this document is one of them. This story had to be written by someone in the higher class since only a fraction of the population was literate. This tale is written about a peasant whose donkey and goods are stolen, and the peasant seeks justice. Audience: If this document was intended to be private, only the government officials would have access to The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. Since court cases were written down, it is possible that Egyptians wanted to reflect on punishments in order to adapt to issues in the future.

Get Access