Last week, I described some judgments of personality that took place in the letters, verses, and inscriptions of individuals in the ancient Middle East circa 850 BCE.
The judgments of individuals in Greece, Phonecia, and Egypt, I concluded, were similar in many ways to the kinds of judgments we make today: petty annoyances with others' failings, poison pen letters, and threats to bring gods' judgments on the perpetrators of ill-considered actions.
I continue this week, turning back the calendar to 1726 BCE and focusing on the Code of Hammurabi, to ask: "Can an ancient legal code tell us anything about judging personality?".
The city of Babylonia was located about 50 miles south of today's Baghdad. Hammurabi was the sixth king of the Old Bablyonian Dynasty, ruling for 43 years (1728 - 1686 BCE); his legal code was issued in the second year of his reign. Hammurabi is shown bestowing the Code in the image below.
Much of the code is concerned with the laws of commerce, inheritance, family estates, and sometimes, acts of thievery and war. The Code's various sections concern how to handle such issues as a merchant's claims against a vender, a wife's rights to marriage and property after her husband has become a conscript or been kidnapped, a son's rights to an inheritance, and the like.
A careful reading of the code also reveals something about how personalities were judged at the time.
For example, the Code reflects the general knowledge that people lie to one another, and that some people cannot be trusted. One section of the legal code states that if any man claims to have lost property but cannot produce witnesses attesting to the loss, "he was a cheat and started a false report...".
Aside from lying, the Code reflects the knowledge that a person might make mistaken judgments about another's character -- and that such beliefs might be hard to change.
For example, the Code states that although a husband might have "been going out and disparaging [his wife] greatly," if that woman, upon investigation, had been "careful" and "not at fault," she could be released from the marriage by a court.
In a similar vein, if a father disinherits his son owing to what appears to be the father's faulty or biased judgment, the disinheritance will be overturned by the court, which will act on behalf of the unfairly-judged son.
To return to the issue of truth-tellers versus deceivers, various methods were employed to distinguish one from the other. A key procedure was to call witnesses. If a given litigant could find witnesses to support his or her claims, it was regarded as a good sign.
When the matter was serious, such as an accusation of sorcery, and could not be decided by witnesses, another approach to detecting deception involved using the Euphrates River. As the Code recounts:
...the one against whom the charge of sorcery was brought, upon going to the river, shall throw himself into the river, and if the river has then overpowered him, his accuser shall take over his estate; if the river has shown that...[the litigant] is innocent and he has accordingly come forth safe, the one who brought the charge of sorcery against him shall be put to death...
Historians tell us that the Euphrates was regarded as a kind of god that could give signals: if the individual floated and made it to shore, it indicated innocence. The guilty drowned.
(By comparison, in the Middle Ages in Europe, those thrown in the water who drowned were said to be innocent; the guilty survivors were put to death, ensuring death for the accused either way!).
I suspect that people of Hammurabi's time were not terribly comfortable using the truth-by-river approach. The Code generally advocated the use of witnesses wherever practical.
Personality judgments have been an integral part of early legal systems. To decide certain legal conflicts requires recognizing and understanding personality differences: that people sometimes lie, and that some people may lie strategically for their own personal gain. It requires, in other instances, recognizing that sometimes people sincerely come to believe certain false judgments they make of one another. It motivates the development of technologies (witnesses, truth-by-river) to discern when someone is truthful or not.
Once again, ancient judgments of personality share a continuity with contemporary concerns about the people around us.
Will the continuity extend still further back in time? More in an upcoming post...
Notes. The quotes from the legal code of Hammurabi can be found in: Hammurabi (c. 1670 BCE/1958). The Code of Hammurabi in Pritchard, J. B. The Ancient Near East (pp. 138-167). T. J. Meek (Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quotes: "he was a cheat and started a false report..." (Part 11, p. 140). "been going out and disparaging [his wife] greatly" (Part 142, p. 142). "a father who disinherits his son" (Part 168, p. 157), "if the river" (Part 2, p. 139). Images: The upper part of the stela of Hammurabi's code of laws. Copyright expired [http://www/ib/hu-berlin.de/~wumsta/Milkau/milkau.html Fritz-Milkau-Dia-Sammlung].
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(c) Copyright 2008, John D. Mayer
