B-Notes #4

Hammurabi's Code

Most people are forced to get their hands cut off when found guilty.

Unlike now, when charged of a crime, one is innocent until proven guilty. If the person who accuses someone of being guilty does not have enough evidence to prove the other party is guilty, the accuser is always sentenced to death.

When a father is guilty of incest with his daughter, the charges are less severe than when mother and son are guilty of incest. With the father and the daughter, the father is exiled, but in the other case, both are burned.

209.  If a man strikes a free-born woman so that she loses her unborn child, he shall pay ten shekels for her loss.
211. If a woman of the free class loses her child by a blow, he shall pay five shekels in money.
Those two go against each other.
As well as the three below:
215. If a physician performs eye surgery and saves the eye, he shall receive ten shekels in money.
216. If the patient be a freed man, he receives five shekels.
217. If he be the slave of some one, his owner shall give the physician two shekels.




Onto the notes we took during class:
The Earliest cities: Mesopotamia

• =Fertile crescent (now Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, but mostly Syria and Iraq).
• In Mesopotamia was the district Sumer, toward the Southeast.
• Sumer was situated on the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
• With new irrigation technologies, the population was able to increase dramatically.
• With the dramatical increase in population size, cities and towns with up to 40,000 inhabitants were starting to emerge.
• Better food storage led to the creation of other jobs, such as priests, tradesmen, artisans, politicians, and farmers.
• Kings and family dynasties emerged along with the concept of "city-state".
• Sumerians invented "cuneiform"--the earliest form of writing.
• Pantheon--large number (of something)--of Sumerian gods and goddesses emerged.
• The World's first (surviving) epic story was the Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh" (told of a great flood that destroyed the world, similar to the story of the Great Flood).
• Sumerians then divided an hour into sixty minutes and a minute into sixty seconds; also an organized calendar based on the moon cycles.
• The Great Ziggurat of Ur is a Sumerian temple built on top of a "mountain" of earth.