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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

 

 

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
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Durable dispositions:
the stele of Hammurabi of Babylon

Ömür Harmansah ~ October 10, 2007 ~ My office.


"I am indeed the shepherd who brings peace, whose scepter is just. My benevolent shade was spread over my city, I held the people of the lands of Sumer and Akkad safely on my lap... May any wronged man who has a case come before my statue as king of justice, and may he have my inscribed stele read alod to him. May he hear my precious words and my stele clarify his case for him. May he examine his lawsuit and may he calm his (troubled) heart. May he say: 'Hammurabi... provided just ways for the land."

Hammurabi, King of Babylon, Stele of Hammurabi from Susa. Quoted from Marc van de Mieroop, A history of the ancient Near East. Blackwell 2nd edition (Malden MA: 2007), 113.

"In sum, it may be inferred that Hammurabi never intended that his rules be accorded the status of practical law... the famous law code of Hammurabi was designed, or better adapted as a piece of political propaganda to win the hearts and minds of citizens of formerly autonomous city-states."

Yoffee 2005: 107 and 109.

"It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the social world that conceives of social relations as relations of physical force and a "cybernetic" or semiological vision which portrays them as relations of symbolic force, as relations of meaning or relations of communication."

Bourdieu 1999: 67.

Uploaded ImageHere I would like to briefly return to Norm Yoffee's elegant discussion of the Stele of Hammurabi, and its echoes in our meeting last week. Maybe I can clarify also a bit more articulately why I was critiquing Yoffee's "symbols of incorporation" (33), particularly since my comments met an overall silence in the room.

The solid and tall and dark and shiny (diorite) stele (2 m in height, taller than you) of this Mesopotamian judicial celebrity, Middle Bronze Age king of Babylon, the gloriously just shepherd, Hammurabi (or Hammurapi, 1792-1750 BC), was found at Susa, where it was taken as booty by the Elamites. A bad translation of the text is all over the place online, the monument itself sits in the Louvre, where it was taken as cultural heritage property by the French, while a replica is open to visits at the University Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. The stele was put up at a time (midst of the Middle Bronze age) when Mesopotamian political topography was shaped by small competetive regional states such as Mari, Yamhad, Ebla, Shamshi-Adad's Assur, dynasties of the Isin-Larsa kings and Hammurabi's Babylon. This is also when Assyrian merchants are running their family businesses over in the Central Anatolian plateau exchanging their delicate textiles with shiny silver, Eblaites, Alalakhites, Yamhadites and others are building their new cities, new palaces, new temples to various incarnations of the Storm God with stone orthostats, Zimri-lim is enjoying his palm shaded courtyard in Mari with his "penseur fontionnaire" bureaucrats, Shamshi-Adad is storming the Northern Mesopotamian landscapes putting up monuments and building forts all over the place, Isin-Larsa kings establishing and running their scribal schools where the dub-sar were not only teaching young minds in the intricacies of the cuneiform culture, state ideology and Mesopotamian mythology but also sifting through literary texts to produce new compositions that glorified their rulers. It is a really fun time in Mesopotamia for the genesis of the state and its techniques of governmentality. I'd say much more so than the Uruk period, upon which the "penseur fonctionnaire" of American academia has been fixated for a while as we have seen (e.g see Stein, all literature). I just got a book from the Rock on Mesopotamian mathematics which suggests that the "technical constants in bureaucracy and education" was also mainly configured, crystallized in this same Old Babylonian period. It only makes sense that Hammurabi's scholars are working intensely on the "codification and objectification" of law at this time.

I see this is growing into an endless paper, but let me come to my point directly. It has been recently suggested by many such as van de Mieroop and Norman Yoffee and others that it is not accurate to talk about the Stele of Hammurabi as a law code of the modern sense because it clearly did not operate as a binding document to regulate comprehensively the everyday judicial practices in society. This is a wonderful development because it warns us about the excessively literal and deeply anachronistic readings of this monument. Instead, we are recommended to see the monument as being "symbolic" in the sense of communicating the public an image of the king as a just king, the state as a just state. Fantastic. Norm Yoffee's section on the legal practices in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia and the place of Hammurabi's text (not the monument) in that very context was very mind-opening for me as it provided a perfect paradigm in which the state codifies and objectifies and institutionalizes a set of (judicial) practices of diverse kinds "already-there" in the social sphere. These are embedded real practices of the quotidian life where a hierarchy of judicial functionaries help to solve legal problems. Excellent!

Now my divergence from Yoffee's approach is further encouraged by (my reading of) Bourdieu's piece which we will be discussing tomorrow. Bourdieu suggests (most clearly in the quote above) that the symbolic force can not be distinguished from the social relations of the physical force. This I read as saying that symbolic expression does not necessarily operate in opposition to the material world of real practices. To repeat the recent arguments about Hammurabi's stele: this is not an actual binding document for judicial operations, it is just a symbolic expression of the king, a propaganda. This argument falls into the usual trap of traditional art historical structuralism that places art not in the realm of the real world but somewhere up in the epiphenomenal world of symbolic expression. Yoffee's "symbolic and ceremonial resources" are also in danger of subscribing to understanding rituals, monuments, pictorial representations as an "effect" and "afterthought" of the cultural processes and not integral to it.

I would like to suggest that Hammurabi's monument is many things: it is first of all a public monument set up in a public place, and with its monumentality it performs a spectacle of the state. Secondly it is a codification and objectification of law by the state, as Yoffee has meticulously shown, emerging from the real, judicial practices in the social world, which itself is multifarious and heterogeneous. It may be correct to say that the monument is not necessarily a practical corpus of judiciary rules set to regularize and operate consistently and comprehensively the everyday, case by case. But I insist that it is in any case an objectification, crystallization of law that is made legible, made inscribed literally and metaphorically into the social world. It becomes an "objectified symbolic capital" in Bourdieu's terms (65). By materially incorporating Shamash, the sun god sitting on his divine throne and a mountain, handing the scepter of rulership to Hammurabi who is saluting him on the top of the monument, Hammurabi draws a divine legitimation to his kingship as well as his techniques of governmentality. But all of this emboldens the agency of the monument in the public sphere, inserting and extending the king's agency and the agency of the state into the social world. It establishes a "durable disposition" that is corporeal as well as legible. In its textual corpus, it establishes social norms concerning gender, sexuality, collectivitity, family values, memory and a collective understanding of history. As such, yes it is a utopia. By presencing however in the public sphere, the Stele of Hammurabi gathers around itself its "subjects", individuals defined by the state as equally subject to this very law. By subjegation through law-making, it constructs subjecthood.