Hammurabi was the king of one of Ancient Mesopotamia’s
city-states. He brought all of the city-states together to form one huge empire
called Babylonia.
He wanted life to be fair, and so he made a set of laws:
Hammurabi’s Code. It had about 280 different laws that dealt with wages, trade,
penalties, rent-rates, marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance, assault, etc.
In my opinion, the punishments are a bit too violent, but there are many fair
rules too.
Here are some examples:
If a
slave strikes a free man, his ear may be cut off.
So a slave punches a farmer, and he loses a limb? That
doesn’t seem at all fair to me. However, this one does:
If,
due to crop failure resulting from either a flood or drought, someone is unable
to pay interest on debt, he may be excused from the interest that year.
There are also a lot of death penalties, which I don’t
think helped much. But overall, this code changed humanity forever, and helped
us come to where we are today.
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