Definition
Hammurabi's Code is a Babylonian legal text from around 1750 BCE, inscribed in cuneiform on a stone stela and a set of clay tablets. It opens with a prologue claiming divine sanction — the sun god Shamash hands the laws to King Hammurabi — and continues for nearly 300 case-style rulings on debt, theft, marriage, slavery, injury, and commerce.
Harari uses Hammurabi's Code as a paired case study with the US Declaration of Independence. The two documents are about as opposite as legal texts get — one entrenches a strict hierarchy of free men, commoners, and slaves; the other proclaims that all men are created equal. Harari's claim is that both rest on imagined principles that have no physical existence. Neither hierarchy nor equality can be found under a microscope.
Why it matters
How it works
Legally, the Code is casuistic rather than statutory — it states case-by-case rulings, not abstract principles. That format makes it easy to memorize, easy to teach in a scribal school, and possible to apply by analogy to new cases.
Politically, the Code does two jobs at once. It standardizes administration across Babylon's empire (one set of rules everywhere) and it broadcasts the king's righteousness (the prologue and epilogue make sure the reader knows who Hammurabi is). The combination — administrative tool plus propaganda — is the recurring pattern of large-scale legal codes through history.