Hammurabi’s face hangs among the great lawgivers in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the primary sources reveal a patient warlord who waited out the aging king Rim-Sin of Larsa, absorbed his territory intact, and dismantled allies like Elam, Mari, and Eshnunna once they had served their purpose.

This episode examines the seven-foot basalt stele commissioned around 1753 BC as a public relations tool: the carving of Shamash handing over a rod and ring, the 200-line prologue that delays its main verb, class-scaled penalties for nobles, commoners, and the enslaved, interest caps and minimum wages, and the finding that no surviving court record ever cites the code. We also cover list science, the nearly 300 lines of curses in the epilogue, and the stele’s theft to Susa about six centuries later.

• Why Hammurabi spent decades on walls, debt forgiveness, canals, and temples before and after his conquests
• How an eye for an eye applied between nobles but became a silver fine when the victim was a commoner
• The collapsing-house laws that execute an architect, or the architect’s son, to balance the ledger
• The pragmatic reasons a 20 percent interest cap protected taxpayers and conscripts from debt slavery
• The goat-threshing penalty as evidence the code was a scholarly exercise, and how scribes copying it for a thousand years made him immortal