Chapter 10 is a stub chapter that would benefit from Collaborative Research volunteer expansion.
Could you help us expand Chapter 10 to include more of what is teased in its Key Concepts section, other general queries for the chapter, and anything else that makes sense?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?OpenSee All Queries
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?OpenSee All Queries 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?OpenSee All Queries 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.OpenSee All Queries
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.OpenSee All Queries
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.OpenSee All Queries
Stub Paragraphs on Etymology
Note that “religion” and “connect” also are found above all with financial debtsVague TextCan you help us make this text less vague?OpenSee All Queries: “obligation” = “Verbindlichkeit.”Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?OpenSee All Queries Wilhelm Eilers[1] suggested a link with the Latin word “lex” (“law”) connected with “ligare” (“connect,” and “legislate”). But Julius Pokorny[2] tied “lex” to “collection,” i.e., of juridical instructions (a collection is something tied together).
Akkadian “hubullulm” meant “rate of interest,” from “habalum” (to fasten, tie, or connect). Note the sign “h/hbl”: “eblum,” cord, Arab “habl.”
So what is Latin, “nexus” legislation. “Nexum” servitude. In fetters.
Mini-Bibliography for Stub Paragraphs on Etymology
[Observatory Editor’s Note: The following items were not in the Chapter 10 Bibliography, and perhaps citations in the above stub paragraphs are needed. Links to and verifications of these sources would be appreciated if they should be added to the text above. If you can connect them to ideas in the stub paragraphs above or in paragraphs near this query in the Chapter 10 body at the point at the end of the section The Philology of Order, we will add them as footnotes in the body text (existing or your suggestion to add) where you indicate and also add them to the Chapter 10 Bibliography (see also this query).]
Elena Cassin, “Le sceau: Un fait de civilisation dans la Mesopotamie ancienne,” in Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations (1960), pp. 742–751.
Emile Szlechter, Le Contrat de société en Babylonie, en Grèce et à Rome (Paris: 1947).
Note From Chapter 6
The first sacred storehouses were to protect the community’s food and seed, and animals may have been first domesticated in the process of penning them up to have them on hand for sacrifices at the communal feasts which demarcated archaic calendars. Communal festivals accordingly became the paramount occasions for distributing all forms of the social surplus—gifts, taxes, and ultimately commercial products at fairs.
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