Explain how Hammurabi unified Babylon and analyze his published law code as evidence of Babylonian society and values.
Around 1792 BCE, a king named Hammurabi took the throne of Babylon, then a fairly small city-state in Mesopotamia. Over roughly forty years he conquered or absorbed the surrounding cities and unified most of Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule for the first time. Ruling such a large, diverse territory was a new challenge: different cities had different customs and different judges, which made outcomes unpredictable. Hammurabi's solution was to collect and publish one law code that would apply to everyone in his kingdom.
The Code of Hammurabi, carved around 1754 BCE into a tall stone pillar called a stele, contains about 282 laws covering trade, property, family, and crime, and it was set up in public where people could see it (or have it read to them). Many laws follow the principle "an eye for an eye" -- the punishment matches the harm -- but punishments also changed depending on the social class of the people involved: a noble, a commoner, and an enslaved person could receive different penalties for the same offense. That detail tells historians a great deal about how rigid and unequal Babylonian society's class structure really was, even though the code's existence also shows a real effort to make justice consistent and public rather than left to a single judge's whim.
Mastery looks like: They can explain why Hammurabi published his code and use specific laws as evidence about Babylonian values and social class.
Common stumbles: Treating the whole code as only "an eye for an eye" and missing that punishments varied sharply by social class.