The collection of 282 laws carved onto a black basalt stele by the Babylonian king Hammurabi around 1754 BCE — one of the oldest and most complete legal texts to survive from the ancient world — that established graduated punishments based on class, codified the principle of proportional retribution, and presented law as a gift from the gods entrusted to a just king.
In 1901, French diggers in Iran pulled a finger-shaped black stone nearly eight feet tall out of the ground. Carved into it were 282 laws written by a king who had been dead for three thousand years. Near the top, that king sat receiving the laws from the sun god himself. The message was clear: these rules came from heaven. The stone is now in Paris. The laws it carries are among the oldest we have anywhere on earth, and some of them still sound surprisingly familiar.