§42 is something that is still relevant today, should be, with
regardless of housing and such
> If a man rented a field for cultivation but has not produced any grain in the field, he will be convicted of not working the field and will give the owner of the field grain corresponding to his neighbors.
There is probably cases of essentially fraud where it is litigated today too. Like you rent something and promise share of revenue, but then do not actual do anything. Contracts are hopefully very much better defined. But in standard arrangement where you promise to work fields and promise to give part of harvest to land owner it is obvious that you should not be excused of not actually doing that.
Yes, that's exactly how rent works nowadays. You rent a piece of real estate and you pay the rent. So, yes, it's still relevant today but not particularly noteworthy.
This is terrible for long-term ecological health. The soil needs time to recover, and if it's constantly farmed, the soil just gets more and more depleted. A very early example of well-intentioned regulations ending up causing more harm than good (and indeed, much of what used to be fertile farmland in that part of the world is now desert from over-farming).
The deal with the state is in principle the following:
1. If you have a conflict with some other person/family/clan the buck needs to stop somewhere otherwise you just swap murders back and forth indefinitely
2. Having the buck stop with another (third?) person/family/clan is unaccaptable to most persons/families/clans, why would you voluntarily yield power to them?
3. Having learnd from centuries of bloodshed and oppression you develop a system where you can collectively decide on with whom the buck stops and more important: a system where you can remove someone if you are collectively unhappy with their performance in that position.
Now there are a myriad possible ways of doing 3, with some of them tracking the collective will more closely than others, with different definitions of who is included in the collective, with different ways of persisting certain elements through the power transition etc. But anybody who knows about history and politics knows that without that you will even have more chaotic, violent and oppressive circumstances. Unless you happen to be in the clan that is currently in power and you happen to have no war and/or bloody throne-fight during your life.
Especially in countries with housing taxes (you pay based on where you live, independently of how much you earn or wether or not you earn anything) and property tax (based on an estimated value of what is owned, independently of any revenue).
In some places, it would almost seem merely existing is ground enough for taxes.
> America was founded on people taking up arms against the taxman [while lacking political enfranchisement].
The second half of the slogan "no taxation without representation" is not a minor detail. In fact the Tea Act [0] —which motivated the Boston Tea Party protests, to which the British government's escalation in response eventually led to the American Revolution— was not an act establishing or increasing any tax. On the contrary, the Tea Act was actually reducing taxes and duties on tea!
The idea that the American Revolution was triggered by "taxation" shouldn't be retconned under modern eyes into believing that the colonists were against the idea of taxation.
I understand you to be reading this as progressive, whereas I see it as the opposite: if you rent land but do not have the money to pay (for whatever reason) the rent still has to be paid.
Hammurabi went hard against people who accused others of serious crimes but couldn't build an airtight case -- which is like the opposite of what we do today. Imagine if cops and prosecutors had to serve the sentences of suspects they charged but couldn't convict.
In medieval to modern times we try to balance this with having high burdens of proof, presumption of innocence, beyond reasonable doubt etc.
In very recent times, the erosion of those values together with the ease of making baseless but effectively ruinous allegations lead to situations where we see ancient Babylonian codes as providing a solution!
Apparently there was an assembly of judges who heard cases. There are strict laws governing judges too; if a judge later reneges on a decision he made, he would be made to pay up to twelve times the original judgement and be disbarred from the assembly.
Yeah, Hammurabi was probably tired of having to constantly adjudicate disputes between clans, so his top priority was probably to shut down most complaints from the get go.
Hammurabi didn't adjudicate things himself, despite popular belief (based on stories about King Solomon?). His kingdom had a panel of judges to hear cases -- and the Code had laws to keep them honest. Apparently, the judges often ignored the code in their rulings, however, indicating that judicial corruption is as old as civilization itself.
But yes, not burdening the judiciary with frivolous trials is as good a reason for a high evidentiary standard as seeing that justice is done and the innocent not unfairly prosecuted. Part of the reason for the infamous Japanese high conviction rate, for example, is because the Japanese system won't bother to arrest or charge you unless their case is very solid.
This document is actually pretty innovative in that it actually sets out a bunch of "legal remedies" for several situations and claims a right of violence by the state. In Medieval Europe, disputes were still legally settled via feud or vendetta until the 16th century. Even duels were still practiced centuries later.
seeing some genocidal tendencies in the current world, I sometimes think that maybe, just maybe ancient laws were not dictating the minimal possible punishment, but actually limited it. Like "Kill only you, not all your family". or "Take an eye for an eye, but just an eye, and you'll live"
Keep in mind this law code was likely designed to combat intergenerational grudges between clans, which are extremely brutal (look up the "Hatfield-McCoy feud")
Without extremely harsh punishments, the clans likely would not have been willing to adopt any new code.
You'd think that with the relatively smaller populations of the past, they'd want to preserve manpower and not execute people willy-nilly.
Or were these laws, as most today, just an excuse to consolidate wealth and power from the executed "convicts" into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful?
Very trigger-happy laws are often not intended to be implemented exactly as written. If you have done something against a family that the law says you should be executed for, you can probably purchase your life from them. Same goes for all the eye-for-an-eye punishments.
A very different time and place, but in early medieval Iceland if you poked out someone's eye, that someone now owns your corresponding eye. Then you can together come to terms on whether the eye should be also poked or if you can agree on a price to buy it back.
A more statist example, at times in ancient China the law code had execution as punishment on basically every crime that the state got involved in at all. But most of the condemned were not executed, but eventually had their sentence commuted to internal exile (into some other part of China).
I've read that also in medieval Finland crimes that were punishable by death rarely resulted in actual execution. Fines and other less harsh punishments were preferred, probably because that way the criminal could still remain a contributing member of the community. Makes sense considering how small the communities were back then in these parts of the world.
Pre-birth control, there were usually more mouths to feed than food to feed them.
Modern machines and energy allow things to scale and be decoupled from human productivity enough it’s easy to forget - but it used to be, a hand not helping make food and helping it’s neighbors, was a hand hurting them. In real, concrete ways.
Back then, no one had the infrastructure or wealth to deal with putting a bunch of assholes in cages and feeding them regularly until they ‘behaved’. Usually anyway.
Hell, unless the cages were intentionally horrific, that would often be a step up on most folks day to day living conditions anyway.
So make an example, and make it a spectacle - and cheap. Hard to beat an execution on that front!
Those were times where premature deaths were extremely common and natural. This probably manifested a much reduced fear and intolerance of killing, as against today where murder is a very rare phenomenon and results in long-term trauma across all people who were even remotely involved.
Surplus of labour is entirely possible in agrarian society. Later in Europe there were periods when there was more labour than there was land. In situation like that losing some is not as big deal. Also "state" did not invest in their citizenry. So they did not lose anything by losing people.
From the millions of tablets the historians have analysed, we know that Babylonian (educated) people loved lists. I've heard an Assyriologist make fun of it in his course. There are lists for everything: events, vegetables, mathematical results, year names, Sumerian gods...
As far as I know, they're always flat lists. Some of them, like some intended for rote learning, have an obvious order. In many cases, Historian don't understand the order. But it may be there, just hidden: e.g. Hammurabi's articles could be sorted by chronological date. Or according to omens...
I'm sure there is a structure and a theme that we don't understand because it's been lost to several thousand years of time and cultural context, just as we no longer get the ancient Sumerian joke "A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I can't see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”
There are some articles marked as "Artifact destroyed", does it mean that the original document is lost forever? I see there are missing on another website [0]
It seems to be a variation of §1 - because witchcraft is a serious crime and the god of rivers (Idlurugu) would obviously drown anyone who was a witch.[1]
§1: accuse someone of murder -> (can't prove your case) -> your own life is forfeit
§2: accuse someone of witchcraft -> (can't prove your case) AND (they prove they are not punished/drowned by the river god) -> your own life is forfeit
Trial by ordeal was an ancient thing, even back then.[2] It is the sort of thing you see where there was no real distinction between legal and theological, between law and rite. Indeed, Töyräänvuori concludes:
>Arbitration via suprarational trial seems to be required in cases where it is the word of one person against another, and no forensic evidence can settle the manner. Anthropologically, the ordeal is supposed to reveal whether the witness or accused is lying through the threat of supernatural punishment, functioning as a primitive lie-detector test. Its use in European witch trials likely also follows from this function, as accusations of witchcraft were often spread through social contagion. An important facet of the trials is that they seem to have been meant to acquit the accused innocent of the crime in most of the cases it was used.[2]
It's interesting that unproven (false) accusations and perjury are at the very top of the legal code, with severe punishments attached. Which are exactly the sort of abuses you'd see pop up when a legal code is in place.
It's likely a way for a judge to inject their own subjective judgement into an accusation of witchcraft: The hope is that people that are innocent are more likely to accept a "trial by water" because they hope the deities will help them survive that trial, and the judge can then also add a little of their own subjective opinion, after talking to both parties, to either say "yup they survived the trial, pull them out of the water" or (if they think they deserve it, for whatever reason) let the person drown.
Likely the same logic that went into a lot of Western Christian belief about chivalry and witch-hunting - that God (or whatever Assyrian equivalent in this case) would judge innocence or guilt through the laws of nature.
You have to remember that "logic" presupposed magical thinking and religion at the time.
"Ordeal" was exactly the same process in Europe for centuries. In France at least, this "divine judgment" was mostly by fire and water.
I remember reading about these "river ordeals" in Dominique Charpin's books about Mesopotamia. It was also used in "trials" for infidelity, to the woman, sometimes with her supposed lover. But we don't know the exact process: maybe the suspects were tied up if the authorities thought the accusation was well backed up!
Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name King of Sumeria or The Sumer Game by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language.
Our mythbusting run that reveals the true pioneers behind physics, first-person shooting, and light-guns (not Half-Life 2, Doom, and Duck Hunt respectively).
City Simulation - Credited to: SimCity (1989) - Beaten by 24 years
I typed it in and played it on my Apple ][, from David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games (or maybe an issue of Creative Computing). Also Super Star Trek, too!
I couldn't find the original FOCAL version of Hammurabi at first try, but with a little more digging I found an old scan of a partial listing on archive dot org:
> If a man rented a field for cultivation but has not produced any grain in the field, he will be convicted of not working the field and will give the owner of the field grain corresponding to his neighbors.