The Laws of Hammurabi (the Susa stele, Louvre)

The Laws of Hammurabi, preserved on the Susa stele now in the Louvre, is a primary source of the first order, the actual inscribed law code issued in the name of the Babylonian king, one of the most complete surviving bodies of ancient Near Eastern law. As the physical artifact and its inscribed text itself, it carries direct authority for what the code prescribed and how it framed royal justice as divinely sanctioned. It is a royal promulgation rather than a neutral historical record of actual legal practice, and the degree to which its provisions were applied in everyday Babylonian courts, as opposed to serving primarily as a monumental statement of royal ideology, remains a genuine question Assyriologists continue to weigh against other surviving Babylonian legal and administrative documents from the same period.