Cour Carrée

The Louvre Castle (French: Château fort du Louvre), also known as the Medieval Louvre (French: Louvre médiéval), was a castle (French: château fort) built by King Philip II of France on the right bank of the Seine, to reinforce the city wall he had built around Paris. It was demolished in stages between 1528 and 1660 to make way for the expanded Louvre Palace.

The Code of Hammurabi is a Babylonian legal text composed c. 1755–1750 BC. It is the longest, best-organised, and best-preserved legal text from the ancient Near East. It is written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, purportedly by Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The primary copy of the text is inscribed on a basalt or diorite stele 2.25 m (7 ft 4+1⁄2 in) tall. The stele was rediscovered in 1901 at the site of Susa in present-day Iran, where it had been taken as plunder six hundred years after its creation. The text itself was copied and studied by Mesopotamian scribes for over a millennium. The stele now resides in the Louvre Museum. The top of the stele features an image in relief of Hammurabi with Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice. Below the relief are about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text: one fifth contains a prologue and epilogue in poetic style, while the remaining four fifths contain what are generally called the laws. In the prologue, Hammurabi claims to have been granted his rule by the gods "to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak". The laws are casuistic, expressed as "if ... then" conditional sentences. Their scope is broad, including, for example, criminal law, family law, property law, and commercial law. Modern scholars responded to the Code with admiration at its perceived fairness and respect for the rule of law, and at the complexity of Old Babylonian society. There was also much discussion of its influence on the Mosaic Law. Scholars quickly identified lex talionis—the "eye for an eye" principle—underlying the two collections. Debate among Assyriologists has since centred around several aspects of the Code: its purpose, its underlying principles, its language, and its relation to earlier and later law collections. Despite the uncertainty surrounding these issues, Hammurabi is regarded outside Assyriology as an important figure in the history of law and the document as a true legal code. The U.S. Capitol has a relief portrait of Hammurabi alongside those of other lawgivers. There are replicas of the stele in numerous institutions, including the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

The Pavillon de l’Horloge ("Clock Pavilion"), also known as the Pavillon Sully, is a prominent architectural structure located in the center of the western wing of the Cour Carrée of the Palais du Louvre in Paris. Since the late 19th century, the name Pavillon de l'Horloge has generally been applied to the structure's eastern face, which dates from the 17th century, and the name Pavillon Sully to its western face, which was redecorated in the 1850s as part of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion.

The Louvre Colonnade is the easternmost façade of the Palais du Louvre in Paris. It has been celebrated as the foremost masterpiece of French Architectural Classicism since its construction, mostly between 1667 and 1674. The design, dominated by two loggias with trabeated colonnades of coupled giant columns, was created by a committee of three, the Petit Conseil, consisting of Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault. Louis Le Vau's brother, François Le Vau also contributed. Cast in a restrained classicizing baroque manner, it interprets rules laid down by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, whose works Perrault translated into French (1673). Its flat-roofline design, previously associated with Italy and unprecedented in France, was immensely influential.

The Carrousel du Louvre is an underground shopping mall in Paris, France, managed by Unibail-Rodamco. The name refers to two nearby sites, the Louvre museum and the Place du Carrousel. The mall contains a famous skylight, La Pyramide Inversée (Louvre Inverted Pyramid), which plays an important role in the best-selling 2003 book The Da Vinci Code. Among other stores, it had the first Apple Store in France, and a McDonald's restaurant, which created controversy at the time.

The Lescot Wing (Aile Lescot in French, also Aile Henri II) is the oldest preserved structure above ground of the Louvre Palace in Paris, France. It was designed by architect Pierre Lescot and built between 1546 and 1551. Its architecture is influenced by Italian Mannerism. It had seminal influence on what became the Parisian Renaissance style, and beyond it, French architectural classicism. King Francis I appointed architect Pierre Lescot (1510–1578) to lead all building projects at the Louvre Palace. Lescot's role was reconfirmed following Francis’s death by his son and successor Henry II; Lescot kept working on the Louvre project until his death, completing the Lescot Wing in 1551, the Pavillon du Roi, and the western section of the southern wing of the Cour Carrée.

The Boscoreale Treasure is the name for a large collection of exquisite silver and gold Roman objects discovered in the ruins of the ancient Villa della Pisanella at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, southern Italy. Consisting of over a hundred pieces of silverware, as well as gold coins and jewellery, it is now mostly kept at the Louvre Museum in Paris, although parts of the treasure can also be found at the British Museum.

The Regent Diamond is a 140.64-carat (28.128 g) diamond owned by the French state and on display in the Louvre, worth as of 2015 £48,000,000.

The tour du coin (or tour de la conférence) was one of the corner towers of the ancient wall of Philippe Auguste in Paris, built between 1190 and 1209.

The Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, a former Parisian town house of the royal family of Bourbon, was located on the right bank of the Seine on the rue d'Autriche, between the Louvre to the west and the Church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois to the east. It was constructed in the 14th century, not long after the Capetian Kings of France enlarged the fortress of the Louvre in order to use it as a royal residence. On two 1550 maps it is shown simply as the Hôtel de Bourbon, but by 1652, as the Petit-Bourbon on the map of Gomboust (see below). The Bourbons took control of France in 1589, at which time they also acquired the Louvre. The Great Hall, the Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon, was larger than any room in the Louvre, and served as the first theatre of the troupe of Molière upon their arrival in Paris in 1658; but by 1660 Molière and his actors were evicted, and the Petit-Bourbon was pulled down to make space for the construction of the Louvre Colonnade.

The arrondissement of Paris is an arrondissement of France in the Île-de-France region. It covers exactly the commune and department of Paris. Its population is 2,190,327 (2016), and its area is 105.4 km2 (40.7 sq mi).It has one subdivision : the commune of Paris, which itself has 20 subdivisions: the 20 municipal arrondissements of Paris.

The Académie Française (French pronunciation: ​[akademi fʁɑ̃sɛːz]), also known as the French Academy, is the principal French council for matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution, it was restored as a division of the Institut de France in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte. It is the oldest of the five académies of the institute. The Académie comprises forty members, known as les immortels ("the immortals"). New members are elected by the members of the Académie itself. Academicians normally hold office for life, but they may resign or be dismissed for misconduct. Philippe Pétain, named Marshal of France after the Battle of Verdun of World War I, was elected to the Académie in 1931 and, after his governorship of Vichy France in World War II, was forced to resign his seat in 1945. The body has the duty of acting as an official authority on the language; it is tasked with publishing an official dictionary of the language.