Frame: Mesopotamia ("land between rivers" — Tigris and Euphrates): Sumer's city-states (Uruk, Ur — writing's birthplace: cuneiform, c. 3200 BC; the ziggurat; the wheel; sexagesimal time- keeping) → Akkadian empire (Sargon, c. 2350 BC) → Old Babylonian kingdom, whose sixth king made it immortal.
Hammurabi and his Code (the law student's centrepiece):
• Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BC) unified Mesopotamia from Babylon; his Code — 282 laws on a basalt stele (found at Susa, now in the Louvre), topped by the king receiving the law from Shamash, the sun-god of justice.
• Character (learn five): 1. Published, written law — prologue, epilogue and laws in public view: "so that the strong might not oppress the weak" (the prologue's own justice-claim — the oldest rule-of-law rhetoric known); 2. Lex talionis — "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" — but only between equals; 3. Class-graded justice — the awilum (free), mushkenum (commoner/dependant) and wardum (slave) received different penalties for the same wrong (an eye of a mushkenum compensated in silver, not extracted); 4. Codified daily law — contracts, wages, deposits, marriage and divorce, adoption, physician's fees (and botched surgery!), commercial regulation — a living commercial society's handbook; 5. State justice +private settlement — courts, oath and ordeal alongside the code.
• Jurisprudential verdict (the exam line): Hammurabi's Code is law as monument and associal record — public, prospective, class-graded: proof that written law is as old as civilization itself (cross-ref: your Legal Method Unit 1's "from code to code"). The HangingGardens — the later New Babylonian wonder: attributed to Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BC) for his Median queen's homesickness (terraced gardens watered by screw-pumps, per the Greek accounts) — one of the Seven Wonders; whether it stood in Babylon (or Nineveh, or only in legend) is a standing archaeological debate — teach the legend as legend, and note the New Babylonian achievements it decorates (the city's walls, the Ishtar Gate, Babylon's astronomy → the zodiac).