Ancient Babylon Law

Women at the time were also thought of as little more than property. Law 138 make amazing evidence of this and shows exactly what they though a women’s role was, it describes if a man divorces his wife who has given him no children then all he has to do it reimburse her the marriage price and she gone. The gives the idea that your returning a defective item to the store and hoping to pick up another one. People should have never been treated this way and it is unfortunate that practices much like these continue to this day.

Law 173 is a tradition which has thankfully disappeared over the last 50 years. Up until WW2 women would be paid less for a job than if a man had done it. This law made women be paid only 60% of what a man made which would have openly discouraged them from getting jobs when they could get married and work for the family. This law is not only extremely sexist but extremely dumb since whether a man or women loads a cart its still a job done. I personally believe that this law was created for the sole purpose to make a mans time seem more valuable than a woman’s.

A law that I feel personally against is law 218. This law dictates that if a surgeon operates and his patient die then he would lose his hands. While this may be a way of encouraging finer surgery, it is defiantly going to make finding a surgeon both much tougher and more expensive. This also arises to the problem of creating a mass of cripples within your empire, with them mainly being your healers. Coming from a family with 3 nurses I have heard stories of people who come for help who are beyond help, it is not always the doctors fault and usually isn’t.

Ancient Babylonian laws had their flaws but the served their people for the time, and were a checkpoint in the recording of laws. Ancient Babylon was one of the most advance of their time and had an extremely long dynasty when compared with other civilizations and was eventually toppled by the Persian empire. When the Persian’s took control of the empire they toppled many of the obelisks recording the laws of Hammurabi, it is even more unfortunate that even more relics of this time were destroyed when the Americans first set up a base camp unknowingly on top of a archaeology site. They moved when they learned but the damage had already been done. Laws have come an extremely long way from the time of Hammurabi, but one thing stays the same, there recorded for all to see.