Chapter Outline - 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
From The Observatory
Chapter Outline
The following section was included at the place this query was placed inside the Chapter 10 body, at the end of the Introduction section (now inside a new section we created called Punishments) with the section heading Road Map to Understanding This Chapter. Can you help us flesh out the contents below and determine where if anywhere to place this section inside the Chapter 10 body?
Suggest an edit or addition for this query to make this road map fit into Chapter 10, if possible. Join the research!
Road Map to Understanding This Chapter [Heading Level: 1]
1. Laws: in the first instance were economic laws.
2. Contracts were kept in temples.
But legal suits (covering contractual or other relations) required sworn testimony. See, for example, oaths and rituals such as the Sumerian “water ritual.”
Religious—or at least sanctified—ideas of justice, and sacred sanctions to individual judges and their verdicts.FragmentThis sentence fragment needs to be fleshed out. Can you help us make it a complete sentence with specific subject-verb phrases?
Allotment decisions and even legal verdicts were decided via lot (chance, imbued with a sacred guiding force, as in the tarot today, or casting “runes”).
3. Deification of royal authority. But we must beware of retrojecting ideas of “sacred kingship” back to Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Rather, there were checks and balances among the various articulated parts of early society.
Mediated between “public” and “private” functions, the group and the individual or his family.FragmentThis sentence fragment needs to be fleshed out. Can you help us make it a complete sentence with specific subject-verb phrases? Between lawbreakers and law-abiders, including the families permitted to wreak revenge on their own.FragmentThis sentence fragment needs to be fleshed out. Can you help us make it a complete sentence with specific subject-verb phrases? For crime itself was an economic function, to the extent that punishments were still pecuniary rather than merely punitive according to the law of talion.Transition NoteThis section (three paragraphs long) needs a transition from the sections above. These three paragraphs don’t seem to be part of the ordered list.
Centralized social order was sanctified by being built into the kosmos, its seasonal changes and monthly rituals.Transition NoteThis section (three paragraphs long) needs a transition from the sections above. These three paragraphs don’t seem to be part of the ordered list.
Goddesses no longer took the lead in (re)shaping the natural order and decreeing social policy, but played the conservative role of protecting against the chaos of moral disorder. They became divine patrons of fair weights and measures, hospitality, civility, and distributive justice in general, being called on to avenge violations of sacred laws and fair dealing, or the hubris of arrogant grandiosity.Transition NoteThis section (three paragraphs long) needs a transition from the sections above. These three paragraphs don’t seem to be part of the ordered list.
