Almost 4,000 years ago, a young king named Hammurabi inherited the small and unimportant city of Babylon in the region of Mesopotamia, now in present-day Iraq. Over his lifetime, Hammurabi expanded Babylon in size and in importance, making the city the most important in the region by the time of his death. It would remain so for more than 1,000 years. Though Hammurabi was a politician, a diplomat, and a warrior, he is remembered mostly for his code of law, the tall monument of stone inscribed with hundreds of legal rulings that influenced the future laws of the region and then of the Western...