The Laws of Wine Drinking According to the Hammurabi Code

In a hushed gallery of the Louvre stands a pillar of black basalt taller than a grown man, its polished surface packed top to bottom with wedge-shaped cuneiform. This is the Code of Hammurabi, carved around 1754 BC and among the most complete law codes to survive from the ancient world¹. Most people know it for a single phrase — an eye for an eye. Far fewer know that, scroll down the column of some 282 rulings, you reach something almost comic in its specificity: laws about how to run a bar⁴.

They were set down on the orders of Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, who over a long reign welded the quarrelsome cities of Mesopotamia into a single kingdom⁵. Tucked among his statutes on theft, marriage, inheritance and surgery are four that govern the sale of drink — and they are among the harshest on the entire stone².

A law code carved in seven feet of stone

The stele stands about 2.25 metres high. At its top, a carved relief shows Hammurabi standing in respect before Shamash, the enthroned sun god of justice, who hands him the rod-and-ring that symbolise the divine authority to rule and judge³. Below, the laws themselves march down the pillar in column after column of Old Babylonian cuneiform — a public monument meant to show that the king’s justice came from heaven itself.

The monument then vanished for three thousand years. Around 1150 BC it was carried off as war booty to Susa, in what is now Iran, where a French archaeological team unearthed it in 1901 and shipped it to Paris³. It was not even the first law code — the code of Ur-Nammu of Ur predates it by roughly three centuries — but Hammurabi’s is the fullest early code we can still read in its own words, which is why it became the world’s most famous⁴.

The laws of the tavern

Laws 108 through 111 regulate the tavern and, above all, its keeper — called in Akkadian the sābītum, a female ale-wife who brewed, sold and served². The penalties read like something out of a nightmare:

Read law 108 slowly. A tavern-keeper who cheats a customer on measure — the ancient equivalent of a short pour — is not fined. She is drowned². Law 109 turns her into an arm of the state: her bar must not become a den for conspirators, on pain of her own life. Law 110 polices status, forbidding a consecrated nadītum priestess from so much as stepping inside for a cup².

“If a tavern-keeper does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.”— Code of Hammurabi, Law 108²

Wine, or beer?

Here a little honesty is needed. The everyday drink of Mesopotamia was not wine but barley beer — thick, bread-like and nourishing enough to be handed out as a daily ration⁶. The sābītum behind the counter was really an ale-wife, and what she measured out was mostly beer.

Wine existed, but as a luxury. Grapes struggled in the hot, flat south, so wine was carried down from the cooler highlands to the north and east — the Zagros mountains and the southern Caucasus of Armenia and Georgia, where the world’s oldest winemaking is documented⁸. By the time a jar reached Babylon it was expensive stuff, fit for temples, palaces and the rich. What Hammurabi’s tavern laws really policed, then, was the beer trade — but in doing so they set the template that every wine-selling culture would inherit: the state deciding how drink may be sold, and at what honest measure⁴.

Why the tavern-keeper was a woman

The code assumes the seller of drink is female, and that reflects real life: in Mesopotamia, brewing and tavern-keeping were women’s work⁶. Even the divine patron of beer was a goddess, Ninkasi, honoured in a hymn that doubles as a step-by-step brewing recipe — arguably the oldest beer recipe on record, a prayer you could ferment by.

The ale-wife even walks through the era’s greatest poem. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, at the very edge of the world, the grief-stricken hero meets Siduri — a divine tavern-keeper who runs an inn by the sea⁷. She gives him the oldest surviving piece of advice in world literature: since the gods have kept immortality for themselves, fill your belly, enjoy your days and nights, and cherish the ones you love. When Hammurabi’s scribes wrote sābītum, this is the figure they pictured — and it was on her that the river-and-fire penalties fell.

The first rules for selling a drink

Step back and law 108 looks strikingly modern. It is, at bottom, a consumer-protection rule: a price control that stops the seller cheating the buyer on measure⁴. Law 109 is licensing as surveillance; law 110 a morality clause; law 111 sets ordinary terms of credit. Together they are, as far as we know, the earliest written regulation of the drinks trade anywhere on Earth — some fifteen centuries before classical Greece and seventeen before Rome.

Every liquor licence, every trading-standards officer who checks a short pour, every “responsible service” law traces a faint line back to these four rulings on a Babylonian pillar. The next time a bartender levels your glass to an honest measure, spare a thought for the sābītum of Babylon — who, for doing otherwise, could be thrown into the river⁴.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

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• Wine, the Vatican and the papacy
• The sublime language of wine and poetry

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica — Code of Hammurabi. www.britannica.com ↩
2. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School — The Code of Hammurabi (trans. L. W. King). avalon.law.yale.edu ↩
3. Musée du Louvre — Law Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon. www.louvre.fr ↩
4. World History Encyclopedia — Code of Hammurabi. www.worldhistory.org ↩
5. Encyclopædia Britannica — Hammurabi. www.britannica.com ↩
6. World History Encyclopedia — Beer in the Ancient World. www.worldhistory.org ↩
7. World History Encyclopedia — The Epic of Gilgamesh. www.worldhistory.org ↩
8. Penn Museum — P. E. McGovern on the origins and spread of ancient wine. www.penn.museum ↩

Recommended reading

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
Traces civilisation through six drinks, beginning with the beer of Mesopotamia and the world of Hammurabi’s tavern laws.

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern
The definitive account of how wine emerged in the ancient Near East, from the biomolecular archaeologist who found the earliest traces.

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