The complete Code of Hammurabi (~1750 BC)

Forcing others to do what you want generally does not end well.

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).

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.

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.

Did he have a separate judiciary? If not, I could imagine him getting sick of loads of people coming to him with accusations.

Way too many false accusations these days means we might have relaxed these standards too much.

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!

This is also the Old Testament's punishment for perjury (Deuteronomy 19:16-19)

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.

That’s a paddlin’

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?

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"

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewiger_Landfriede

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.

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.’”

I'm no expert, but one would imagine the list grew organically, adding new laws as they became necessary, like an append-only data structure.

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...

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.

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.

"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!

Well, if she weighs the same as a duck...

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idlurugu#Idlurugu_as_a_legal_p...

[2] http://saa.uaic.ro/wp-content/uploads/6.-Joanna-T%C3%96YR%C3...

An example of interesting comment that unfortunately happens to be very easy to wrongly attribute to a LLM if only given a passing glance.

Second link actually contains the complete code of Hamurabi. ;)