As a result of the intensive work done on the Code of Hammurabi itself by the many scholars who have devoted their study to it, we now understand it far better than before. It would be invidious to attempt to assign each step to its own author, and I expressly disclaim any originality for views that I may have held long before some one else published them, but it may add to the confidence with which my readers follow me, if they remember that nearly everything has been independently reached by two students at least. My chief desire, however, is to make my views clear, and to state my reasons as intelligibly as may be. I propose to deal first with the external features of the Code of Hammurabi, dwelling chiefly on those that are useful for a comparison with the Israelite legislation. Then, secondly, I will point out briefly the types of likeness between the Babylonian and Hebrew laws, and the associated contrasts. Then I will venture to discuss in my way and attempt to estimate the extent of dependence, if any. But I cannot claim to have said the last word on any point raised here. We are still at the mercy of future discovery. Let us hope it will be merciful to some theories, at any rate. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE LAWS OF BABYLONIA AND THE LAWS OF THE HEBREW PEOPLES LECTURE I The discovery of the principal record of the system of enactments now known by the name of the Code of Hammurabi was made in December 1901 and January 1902. At Susa, the ancient Persepolis, named ‘Shushan the Palace’ in the Book of Daniel, situated in Persia, once the ancient capital of Elam, the excavators, working under the direction of J. de Morgan for the French Ministry of Instruction, found three large pieces of black diorite, which when fitted together formed a monolith stela, about 2·25 metres high, tapering upwards from 1·9 to 1·65 metres. The stone itself is in the Louvre Museum in Paris, but a beautiful reproduction of it stands in the Babylonian Room of the British Museum. At the top of the stela is engraved in low bas-relief a representation of Hammurabi himself receiving his laws from a seated god, usually taken to be the sun-god Shamash, who was regarded in Babylonia as the supreme judge of gods and men, whose children or attendants were Mishâru and Kittu or Rectitude and Right. Below this scene begins the inscription, written in Semitic Babylonian, then called Akkadian, and arranged in parallel narrow columns. These columns were read from left to right and downward precisely like those of a modern newspaper, but each column goes across the stela like a belt. Consequently a reader must turn his head on one side to read the inscription.