Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

But Hammurabi’s famous code is no longer the oldest set of laws we have. In the 1940s an earlier code, written in Sumerian, was discovered.¹⁰⁶ This had been set down by Lipit-Ishtar (1934–1924 BC) of Isin, a city which was prominent in southern Mesopotamia after the fall of Ur. It too contains a prologue which speaks of the gods raising Lipit-Ishtar to power ‘to establish justice in the land . . . to bring well-being to the people of Sumer and Akkad’. The two dozen or so laws are more limited in scope than Hammurabi’s, covering ownership of land, including theft from or damage to an orchard, runaway slaves, inheritance, betrothal and marriage, injury to hired animals. Land ownership brought privileges but also responsibilities. For example, § 11 reads: ‘If next to a man’s estate, another man’s uncultivated land lies waste and the householder has told the owner of the uncultivated land, “Because your land lies waste someone may break into my estate; safeguard your estate”, and this agreement is confirmed by him, the owner of the uncultivated land shall make good to the owner of the estate any of his property that is lost.’¹⁰⁷

In the 1950s and 1960s even earlier laws were discovered, deriving from Ur-Nammu, who founded the Third Dynasty of Ur at about 2100 BC. The fragment discovered deals with abuses in taxation and setting up standard weights and measures, but it also has a strong statement of principle, in this case to block the exploitation of the economically weak by the strong: ‘The orphan was not given over to the rich man; the widow not given over to the powerful man; the man of one shekel was not given over to the man of one mina.’¹⁰⁸ The laws of Ur-Nammu make no attempt at being a systematic code, governed by abstract legal principles. They are based on actual cases. Also, unlike the laws of Hammurabi and the Bible, there is no idea of the lex talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, as punishment for causing bodily injury.¹⁰⁹ Talion seems to have been a more primitive form of law, despite its presence in the Bible (a relatively late document, legally speaking). In the Hittite laws (c. 1700–1600 BC), for example, the penalty for stealing a beehive was ‘exposure to a bee sting’, but this was replaced later by a fine.¹¹⁰

But again, all this may make ancient justice sound more organised, and more modern, than it really was. The earliest ‘code’ we now have is that of Uruinimgina of Lagash but he, like the others, may simply have attempted to alleviate the traditional injustices of ancient society, which were always threatening to get out of hand. Uruinimgina’s reforms, like the others, may have been as much royal propaganda as real. Kingships emerged in societies that were changing rapidly and were very competitive. Kings themselves liked to interfere in the administration of justice – it was one of the ways they showed their power. Justice was probably nowhere near as clearly organised as the idealised codes make it appear.

There is evidence of a development in abstract thought in the Mesopotamian cities. To begin with, for example, early counting systems applied only to specific commodities – i.e., the symbol for ‘three sheep’ applied only to sheep and was different from that for ‘three cows’. There was no symbol for ‘3’ in and of itself (in Umberto Eco’s well-known phrase, ‘There were no nude names in Uruk times’).¹¹¹ The same was true of measuring. Later, however, words for abstract qualities – such as number, the measurement of volume in abstract units (hollow spaces), and geometrical shapes (such as triangularity) – emerged. So too did the use of the word LU, to mean ‘human being, individual of the human species’.¹¹² Hardly less momentous was the development of the concept of private property, as evidenced by extra-mural cemeteries which, it seems, were confined to individuals from particular communities.¹¹³ Yet another important ‘first’ of the Babylonians.

It was thus in these first cities that LU, human beings, discovered a genius for art, literature, trade, law – and many other new things. We call it civilisation and we are apt to think of it as reflected in the physical remains of temples, castles and palaces that we see about us. But it was far more than that. It was a great experiment in living together, which sparked a whole new psychological experience, one that, even today, continues to excite many more of us than the alternatives. Cities have been the forcing houses of ideas, of thought, of innovation, in almost all the ways that have pushed life forward.

PART TWO

ISAIAH TO ZHU XI

The Romance of the Soul

5

Sacrifice, Soul, Saviour: ‘the Spiritual Breakthrough’