A lot of the laws in Hammurabi's code are focused on the rights of slaves. Law number 282 says, "If a slave say to his master: "You are not my master," if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear." Hammurabi’s code talks about the entire world of ancient Babylon. Many laws are about slaves
and many are about slave owners. However, the slave has many very severe
punishments for being a bad servant while their owners only get punished for
hurting other slave owners. If you break someone’s bone that is a slave, you
must pay the owner money. If you are a slave owner, your identical bone to the
other slave owner is broken. Law 282 states that, if a slave were to say to his
master I don’t need you then his ear would be cut off. There is also a ton of
laws about slave auctions and how to auction off slaves. The slave laws in
Hammurabi’s code paved the way for the horrible slavery problem all over the
world. Slaves work and work and work for their owners, but what do the slave
owners do besides situating the slaves. Slaves always work much harder than the
rest of the people in society. This is like how in the U.S. that some people
work very hard to try and earn money while some people do a very bad job at
their restaurant and get paid more. Some people who get paid more don’t even work.
Being a slave in Mesopotamia would be such a hard job. Most people don’t have
to experience what it is like but sadly, the chosen few have to. Slaves are
punished for doing anything wrong because if a law does not state it then
potentially their owner would punish them. Slaves also have no way out because
the Underground Railroad was not a thought back then. Plus, if they tried to
escape, then they would just die. The chance of being caught was most likely
almost 100 percent of the time. Mesopotamia was a well thought out, but the
slave laws are just wrong. Women are not treated quite as bad, but they are
also treated unfairly, just like the slaves. Slaves have almost no rights, but
for the few rights they do have, they also have responsibilities. The
responsibility of being a slave is to cater to their master’s every need. A
slave owner must be careful when choosing slaves, because, if they break a law
for the master, the master is the main one punished, but I could easily assume
that the master would not be a happy slave owner. The responsibilities of slave
owners however, are much larger. Slave owners are in charge of making sure that
he has a nice house, food, a little food and housing for the slaves, and nice
water. The responsibility of the Slave owner is a much larger issue, however. Slave
owners have the right to own land, just like most other people, but the
responsibility of owning land is that you may not use the land and put it to
waste. You would be in violation of this law if you used your land for nothing,
and just had the land for the sake of bragging to your fellow slave owners
about how much land you have. They also probably would brag about how many
slaves they had.