Hammurabi's Code

In 18th century B.C.E. King Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon, took it upon himself to come up with an irrefutable set of laws for his people. Hammurabi believed he was ordained by the gods to "bring about the rule of righteousness in the land". The laws were harsh and left no room for excuses, they also treated women, non-nobility(commoners), and slaves as lesser people than noble males. As I read over the laws I was surprised at their cruelty and the total bias against woman, one of the laws stated that if a nun were to enter a tavern to have a drink she should be burned to death! I read one exception to this somewhat deplorable treatment of women and that was if a man was found to be a bad husband, the wife could take her dowry and return to her father, but in turn, if a man were to accuse his wife of adultery the law said she had to jump into the water(as a way of proving innocence, you sink: you're guilty, you float: your free!) for her husbands sake. The treatment of slaves and commoners was also very unfair, for if a nobleman gouged out another nobleman's eye out he would have to loose his eye as punishment, but if a nobleman gouged out a slave's eye he just had to pay a fee to his or her owner. This suggests that, in Babylon and Mesopotamia, noblemen were treated marvelously while anyone else was thought to be inferior. The fact that Hammurabi thought there was a need for such a set of laws also suggests that maybe there might have been issues with lawlessness among the people.