Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BCE) unified much of Mesopotamia under Babylon, and toward the end of his reign gathered older Sumerian and Akkadian legal traditions into a single corpus. The text, inscribed on a diorite stele roughly 2.25 m tall, was distributed as copies across the cities of his realm.

Its best-known principle is 'an eye for an eye' (lex talionis), but the code covers vastly more: property, commercial contracts, marriage, inheritance, medical malpractice, rents, slavery, and water rights. Penalties differ sharply according to the status of victim and offender — noble, free, and enslaved persons faced different consequences for the same act. This is the inverse of modern legal equality, but it is a clear mirror of the social hierarchy of the time.

The relief at the top of the stele shows Hammurabi standing before Shamash, the sun and justice god, who extends to him the symbols of rule. The image asserts that the law descends from divine authority — a logic that recurs in legal traditions across the millennia that follow. The stele was carried off as war booty to Susa by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BCE and rediscovered there by French archaeologists in 1901; today it stands in the Louvre.