The industrious were protected against the careless.  Men who were negligent about controlling the water supply, and caused floods by opening irrigation ditches which damaged the crops of their neighbours, had to pay for the losses sustained, the damages being estimated according to the average yield of a district.  A tenant who allowed his sheep to stray on to a neighbour’s pasture had to pay a heavy fine in corn at the harvest season, much in excess of the value of the grass cropped by his sheep.  Gardeners were similarly subject to strict laws.  All business contracts had to be conducted according to the provisions of the Code, and in every case it was necessary that a proper record should be made on clay tablets.  As a rule a dishonest tenant or trader had to pay sixfold the value of the sum under dispute if the judge decided in court against his claim.

The law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was strictly observed in Babylonia.  A freeman who destroyed an eye of a freeman had one of his own destroyed; if he broke a bone, he had a bone broken.  Fines were imposed, however, when a slave was injured.  For striking a gentleman, a commoner received sixty lashes, and the son who smote his father had his hands cut off.  A slave might have his ears cut off for assaulting his master’s son.

Doctors must have found their profession an extremely risky one.  No allowance was made for what is nowadays known as a “professional error”.  A doctor’s hands were cut off if he opened a wound with a metal knife and his patient afterwards died, or if a man lost his eye as the result of an operation.  A slave who died under a doctor’s hands had to be replaced by a slave, and if a slave lost his eye, the doctor had to pay half the man’s market value to the owner.  Professional fees were fixed according to a patient’s rank.  Gentlemen had to pay five shekels of silver to a doctor who set a bone or restored diseased flesh, commoners three shekels, and masters for their slaves two shekels.  There was also a scale of fees for treating domesticated animals, and it was not over-generous.  An unfortunate surgeon who undertook to treat an ox or ass suffering from a severe wound had to pay a quarter of its price to its owner if it happened to die.  A shrewd farmer who was threatened with the loss of an animal must have been extremely anxious to engage the services of a surgeon.

It is not surprising, after reviewing this part of the Hammurabi Code, to find Herodotus stating bluntly that the Babylonians had no physicians.  “When a man is ill”, he wrote, “they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves, or have known anyone who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.”  One might imagine that Hammurabi had legislated the medical profession out of existence, were it not that letters have been found in the Assyrian library of Ashur-banipal which indicate that skilled physicians were held in high repute.  It is improbable, however, that they were numerous.  The risks they ran in Babylonia may account for their ultimate disappearance in that country.