Hammurabi

Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon and ruled for about forty-two years in the eighteenth century BC. He inherited a small city-state and by diplomacy and war made Babylon the master of Mesopotamia, defeating Larsa, Eshnunna, Mari and Assyria in the later part of his reign. He is remembered above all for the code of laws he had inscribed on a stele of black diorite, surmounted by a relief of the king before the sun god Shamash, which was found at Susa in 1901 and is now in the Louvre. Its nearly three hundred provisions are the fullest surviving statement of Babylonian law.