Ancient Babylon Law

Ancient Babylon was one of the first societies to record their laws for the people to see. Babylon was located in modern day Iraq with its empire stretching far across the Middle East. In the center of each town or at least most, there would have been an obelisk raised for the laws to be recorded on. Obelisks have been commonly used to record knowledge told by the king or Pharaoh in other cultures as well such as ancient Egypt. These laws included everything from what people could and couldn’t do, to how much people would be paid for certain services.     

As with many other ancient civilizations people would have been divided mainly into three different categories; the rich and nobles, peasants and slaves. The nobles would be the king and his family as well as other political figures of importance. The peasants would have been free men who lived ordinary lives and worked for a living. The slaves would be the lowest of the low; they had little to know rights and were forbidden to live their own lives, they were property of richer men and were mere property to them. They would have been seen at about as important as women at the time.                

In Ancient Babylon laws would affect you differently depending on where you stood in society. As a general rule the higher class you were the better these laws would affect, sometime granting you powers over the lower classes. A good example would be law 173. in which it says “If anyone opposes the judgement of the king, his house shall become ruin” This would be the modern day equivalent of  you saying “Stephen Harper suck” and having you and your family murdered. This is a power non-existent in the 1st world and is slowly being pushed out of 3rd world countries. “If anyone opposes the judgement of a dignitary, his head shall be cut off” So basically if you’re rich then your apparently all knowing and if you say something, and a poor person would be to disagree with you there dead.  Laws such as this can be abused by the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo and keep rebellions to a minimum. Of course the laws would always favour the king so if a dignitary were to disagree with the King then his family would be “forgotten”.  Of course there are the proud slaves who get “If a slave rise against his master, he shall go to the pit”. These are laws which both invoke words of rebellion and silence them. Being the bottoms of the barrel slaves had no rights which would reason why this ancient civilization would have fallen eventually to its own people had Persia not invaded them.