Nearly 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi of Babylon created the world'sfirst code of laws. (Actually, it wasn't the first code of laws; there were earlier law codes, but Hammurabi's is the first that we have good records of; the earlier ones are fragmentary.) These provide us with an insight into the thoughtprocesses of the ancients. And the conclusion is striking: they weren't very logical.
In the first place, "code of laws" is a misleading phrase, which today means a carefully crafted set of laws that fit together neatly, covering all criminal behavior in a complete and consistent manner. Hammurabi's laws are really just a pile of 281 rules for local magistrates, with no particular organization. There is no attempt to define or describe legal abstractions such as "criminal intent" or "liability" or "property rights". Instead, they are all phrased in simple terms. Each law takes the form: "If X happens, do Y to the perpetrator." Some examples:
236. If a man rent a boat to a sailor, and the sailor is careless, and the boat is wrecked or goes aground, the sailor shall give the owner of the boat a new boat as compensation.
229. If a builder build a house for some one and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
Inconsistencies are rife:
196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.
198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina.
or
202. If any one strike the body of a man higher in rank than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an ox-hide whip in public.
205. If the slave of a freed man strike the body of a freed man, his ear shall be cut off.
Then there are the laws which seem to defy our notions of logic:
209. If a man strike a free-born woman so that she lose her unborn child, he shall pay ten shekels for her loss.
210. If the woman die, his daughter shall be put to death.
What happens if the perpetrator has no daughter?
These examples clearly demonstrate a lack of logic. All these inconsistencies leap out at a modern reader, and it is difficult for us to comprehend how somebody could promulgate such shoddy laws. Surely Hammurabi could have taken a few minutes to sort through these laws and straighten them out. But there's a reason why Hammurabi couldn't see what you and I can see: he couldn't read. These laws were written down by scribes. Hammurabi thought of them as a big pile of accumulated wisdom that he simply collected and had written down by specialist scribes. For him, the process of writing was really more like the way we might save data to a hard disk or a CD: he just wanted to make certain that they were preserved. His own appreciation of his laws was based on what he had memorized. If you had to manage this collection of 281 laws solely by memory, without recourse to writing, could you spot the inconsistencies?
One thing that the laws clearly demonstrate is a solid grasp of the concept of causality. This springs straight from the natural history mental module. Hammurabi's code is a list of 281 if-then statements. This is causality, the simplest form of sequential thinking.
A few hundred years after Hammurabi, the Hittites build their own empire. They had laws, too, and their laws have come down to us in fairly complete form. 200 laws have been stitched together from a variety of sources, and although they do not cover all legal situations, they do address most of the important issues. The three observations I have to offer about these laws are as follows:
The Hittites used a common system of payments for crimes. (In ancient Germanic law, this was called "weregeld": man-gold). Each crime had its own payment amount. This system worked because the money had to come not from the perpetrator but from his "house" -- his family. The money went straight to the house of the victim. Here's the schedule of payments established in Hittite law (each of these entries was listed as a separate law):
| blind or knock out a tooth [free victim] | 20 shekels |
| blind or knock out a tooth [slave victim] | 10 shekels |
| "injure the head" | 3 shekels |
| injury leading to temporary incapacitation | 6 shekels + replacement worker + medical costs |
| break arm or leg [free victim] | 20 shekels |
| break arm or leg [slave victim] | 10 shekels |
| bite off nose [free victim] | 40 shekels |
| bite off nose [slave victim] | 3 shekels |
| tear off ear [free victim] | 12 shekels |
| tear off ear [slave victim] | 3 shekels |
| cause miscarriage in tenth month (?) [free victim] | 10 shekels |
| cause miscarriage in fifth month [free victim] | 5 shekels |
| cause miscarraige in tenth month (?) [slave victim] | 5 shekels |
Now, we moderns wonder at this table. Why was biting off the nose of a free person the most severely punished action in the list? I would expect blinding a person to be a much more serious crime, but it costs half as much as biting off a nose. Moreover, given this detailed list of injuries and their prices, how is one to determine the price for an injury not listed here? What if you burn a man's arm? Cut off a finger? Break a rib? Emasculate him? (One set of Mesopotamian laws did address the case in which a woman crushed a man's testicle, with different penalties for crushing just one or both testicles. Apparently, women back then were not to be messed with.) But compare the previous table with the penalties for stealing or killing animals:
| bull | 15 cattle |
| cow | 6 oxen |
| stallion | 15 horses |
| mare | 6 horses |
| ram | 15 sheep |
| ewe | 6 sheep |
| plow ox | 10 cattle |
| draft horse | 10 cattle |
| trained goat | 10 cattle |
| mule | 2 mules |
| pig | 6 shekels |
| piglet | 100 liters of barley |
| herding dog | 20 shekels |
| hunting dog | 12 shekels |
| plain dog | 1 shekel |
| bee hives | 6 shekels |
Again we see just enough of a pattern to suggest a logic, but exceptions to the rule that make no sense. The general rule is that, if you steal a male animal, you must pay a fine of 15 animals of the same species. But for mules, the multiplier is only two, and for pigs and dogs, the fine is in silver, not in kind.
Here's another set of inconsistencies, these having to do with men having sex with the following animals:
| Animal | Penalty |
| cow | death |
| sheep | death |
| pig | death |
| dog | death |
| horse | none |
| mule | none |
This is another factor that we moderns find inscrutable: why did they have to list everything in detail? Why not simply substitute some abstractions? For example, the last set of laws could all be reduced to "If (sex with animal) then death" -- except of course for the case of horses and mules. The second set of laws regarding the penalties for stealing or killing animals could have been boiled down to "If (steal or kill male animal) then (fine is 15 of the same animal)" and "If (steal or kill female animal) then (fine is 6 of the same animal). An even simpler approach would have been "If (steal or kill animal) then (fine is 6 times market value of animal). This failure to apply abstraction to the issue reveals a great deal about the weaknesses of the ancient mind.
If anyone finds an ox, a horse, or a mule, he shall drive it to the king's gate. If he finds it in the country, he shall present it to the elders. The finder may use the animal while it is in his custody. When its owner finds it, he shall take it back, but he shall not have the finder arrested as a thief. But if the finder does not present it to the elders, he shall be considered a thief.
What I find significant about this law is its addressing of four different logical cases in a single law. If the animal is found in the city, there is one requirement; but if it is found in the country, there is another requirement. If the requirement is satisfied, then the finder is safe, but if the requirement is not satisfied, then the finder is a thief. All of Hammurabi's laws are simple if-then statements, but this is a complex if-then statement. Clearly, the thinking behind this law went deeper than the thinking behind Hammurabi's laws.