Practice question · Multiple choice
Read as an advertisement rather than a code, what does Hammurabi’s stele testify to?
Hints
- Ask what the monument is for, and the bias direction follows.
- Protector of widows and orphans, fixer of prices, guarantor of dredged canals.
Show the answer
A. What justice had to look like to a Babylonian king
Why
Read as a code it is a puzzle; read as an advertisement it is transparent. Its real testimony is not what the law was but what justice had to look like, which is a question no court record can answer.
Practise Mesopotamia and the First States
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Mesopotamia and the First States
- Put the origin of writing in order.
- Why did cities emerge in southern Mesopotamia despite its poverty in materials?
- Clay tokens sealed inside a hollow ball were made unreadable by the sealing, so scribes pressed each token's…
- Hammurabi's Code is not cited in any surviving Babylonian court record.
- Sort each Uruk feature: evidence of a city or a large village?