Code of Hammurabi, crime, economics and imagining the past

The Code of Hammurabi translated by L. W. King.

I haven't looked at the Code in a couple of decades. 282 laws and a level of binary harshness strange to our age. Highly pragmatic in many ways and lots of checks and balances. Number three certainly incents only honest accusations:

3. If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.

The power of the state looks out for its own.

6. If any one steal the property of a temple or of the court, he shall be put to death, and also the one who receives the stolen thing from him shall be put to death.

There is a steep discount on the value of human life.

8. If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold therefor; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.

This touches on something I noted a while ago, (Eighteen were for burglary and eighteen for forgery);

Existence was hand-to-mouth in a fashion which we can theoretically conceptualize but find it hard to really comprehend. When the theft of your loaf of bread meant going hungry for a day or when the making off with your tool box might mean the loss of your livelihood, shelter and food for your family, things begin to come into focus. When 80% lived at the edge of starvation, and most the rest lived within a couple of weeks of disaster, then the reasons for the apparent barbarism of the age begin to become clearer. Property crimes had the capacity to incapacitate or extinguish life to almost the same degree as a physical assault - it begins to make a kind of sense why the two actions - so distinct to us - were treated so similarly in that age.

I am currently reading a collection of memoirs from the early 19th century as well as Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life and they both make a similar point. The central government was small, weak and with little financial resource. People at large lived hand to mouth. Braudel comments on the low level of agricultural productivity in general and how easy it was for an economy to get out of kilter between population growth and food production, leading to either starvation or population outflow. A description from page 71 gives a sense of the precariousness.

Increases and declines therefore alternated in the short term, regularly compensating each other. This is invariably demonstrated (until the eighteenth century) by the zigzag curves representing births and deaths anywhere in the West - whether in Venice or Beauvais. Those most vulnerable - young children, who were always at risk, or anyone with precarious means of support - would be carried off by epidemics if the balance required it. The poor were always the first to be affected. Innumerable 'social massacres' took place during these centuries. At Crepy, near Senlis, in 1483, 'a third of the town goes begging about the countryside, and old people are dying in squalor everyday'.

Only with the eighteenth century did births gain over deaths, and this was to be the pattern regularly thereafter. But counter-attacks were still possible, as happened in France in 1772-3; and again in the population crisis that struck between 1779 and 1783. These alarms showed how precarious was an improvement of very recent origin and which was still subject to reverses, still at the mercy of the ever-hazardous balance between the demand for food and the possibilities of meeting it through production.

Combine these factors - marginal productivity, near non-existence of central government, no margin of stored wealth to ride out weather fluctuations, and routine presence of starvation (from weather) and death (from epidemics) - and you have a precariousness of life that illustrate why life expectancy was on the order of 20-35 years.

When thought of in this fashion, the Hammurabi Code begins to make a little more (economic) sense. When there is no surplus, all property crimes are really a proxy for survival. When there is no surplus, the choice of punishment for a crime is 1) restitution, 2) some physical punishment (hands, ears, breasts, eyes cut off or out), or 3) death. There is no option for jail as we know it because there is no surplus to pay for a jail. Finally, the fact that life expectancy was so low, probably also meant that the "marginal cost" of a lost life was lower than today. If someone was so insufficiently productive that they had to resort to theft, they probably had only a few more years of life, they were probably unlikely to cover their own food needs, and therefore the loss of their life to the community on the knife edge of survival might likely have been deemed, from a strictly economic survival perspective to have no downside and some upside.

Once again, I am seeing that what I once considered mindless barbarism, was not perhaps mindless but more a function of conditions which I have a hard time imagining but which were none the less real. There is nothing like the privilege of prosperity to dull our awareness of the privation of others.