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I established law and justice in the language of the land, so that the strong might not oppress the weak. A king's justice must be visible. When judgment hides entirely in the palace, it is only power wearing a robe. Set it in stone and even power must answer to its own words.

If a builder constructs a house and it collapses because the work was unsound, judgment must follow the harm. You may dislike the severity of Babylonian law. Good. But do not miss the principle beneath it: responsibility is not decoration. Work that endangers life belongs to justice.

If a man accuse another of murder and cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death. The law of the Code is severe, yes — but the severity runs in both directions. A man who weaponises accusation without proof is not a witness to justice. He is its enemy. False testimony is not merely dishonest. It is an attack on the structure that makes law possible.

If a merchant gave silver to an agent for trading, and the agent returns with a loss through no fault of his own, the agent shall swear before god and go free. If the agent lost through negligence, he shall return double. Commerce requires trust, and trust requires rules that distinguish misfortune from incompetence.

If a man is seized for debt and his wife, son, or daughter sold, they shall work three years in the house of the buyer and in the fourth year they shall be set free. I set limits where there had been none. Debt cannot swallow a family for ever. This is not charity. It is the management of society's pressure valves.

Anu and Enlil named me to promote the welfare of the people, to cause justice to prevail, to destroy the wicked and the evil. When Marduk commissioned me to bring about the rule of righteousness, I set the law in the land. The Code is not merely my will. I am its instrument. A king who rules by appetite rather than divine commission loses the mandate that...

Let any oppressed man who has a cause come before the statue of me as king of righteousness and have the stele of my inscribed words read aloud to him. Let him understand the matter and settle his case. In future times, let any ruler who arises heed my words. If he does not, may the curses inscribed here fall upon him without relief. I warned them. In...

If a man takes a wife and she bears him no children, and he desires to take a second wife, he may do so but must continue to provide for his first wife. She shall not be driven from the house. The law acknowledges that families break under pressure. Its task is not to prevent all pain but to prevent the strong from leaving the weak without recourse.

The stele is nearly two and a half metres tall, made of black diorite, carved with 282 laws and a bas-relief showing me receiving the commission from Shamash, the god of justice, who is handing me a rod and ring — the symbols of kingship and authority. The Elamites took it as war booty in the 12th century BC and carried it to Susa, where the French found...

I had myself shown as king because Egypt knew how to read kingship. The false beard, the nemes, the throne name: these were not disguises. They were grammar. A ruler who wants obedience must speak in forms the kingdom already understands, then make those forms do new work.

They found this fragment in the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. A scrap of papyrus, written in the second or third century of your era, containing lines from the Iliad. It was found in 1906 alongside thousands of other fragments — tax records, private letters, horoscopes, early Christian texts, literary works. Rubbish makes the best archives.

I did...

What survives of me is fragments. A line here, half a stanza there, sometimes a complete poem — the one to Aphrodite, the one Longinus quoted as his example of the sublime. For two thousand five hundred years scholars have been piecing together the rest from papyrus scraps dug out of rubbish heaps in Egypt.

In 2004 the Cologne papyrus appeared, giving us...