Week one: The Code of Hammurabi

Over the course of human evolution, the medium for communication has changed dramatically and in no doubt still evolving today. Cuneiform script written on clay tablets, was the primary way to communicate important information in the early civilisations located in the Middle East. By 2825BC “the direction of writing and the arrangement of words according to their logical position in the sentence had been established” (Costigan 2015, p. 2).

This advancement in technology resulted in the Code of Hammurabi, which is said to be the first written code of behaviour and law in human existence (Costigan 2015, p. 2). The code consists of 282 laws, including punishments to correspond with the crime committed. The Code of Hammurabi is no doubt in the roots of most contemporary judiciary systems and laws that are being used today (Ozek & Ozek 2008). Without the rapid advancement of pictographs on clay tablets, to then represent syllables in a sentence, the code would not have been created for many more years and quite possibly from a different civilisation and not the Mesopotamians. This could have had a profound effect on today’s society and culture.

Whilst the Code of Hammurabi does consist of 282 laws and corresponding punishments, it is also a code of behaviour in which was expected to be followed by all. This code of behaviour is still relevant and an expectation to be followed in the 21^st Century (Ozek & Ozek 2008).

Reference List:

Ozek, C, & Ozek, MM 2008, '"Code of law" of Hammurabi', Child's Nervous System: Chns: Official Journal Of The International Society For Pediatric Neurosurgery, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 537-538.

Costigan, L 2015, 'Module 1: The media of early civilisation' COMM12022: Technology, Communication and Culture, CQUniversity e-courses.