Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

16.
 A stone stela inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi
, 
c
.1776 
BC
.
Impressive, no doubt, but we mustn’t harbour rosy illusions about ‘mass
cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire.
‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom
egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards
oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the burgeoning cooperation
networks with their precious food surpluses, despairing when the tax collector
wiped out an entire year of hard labour with a single stroke of his imperial pen.
The famed Roman amphitheatres were often built by slaves so that wealthy and
idle Romans could watch other slaves engage in vicious gladiatorial combat. Even
prisons and concentration camps are cooperation networks, and can function only
because thousands of strangers somehow manage to coordinate their actions.

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17.
 The Declaration of Independence of the United States, signed 4 July 1776
.
All these cooperation networks – from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the
Qin and Roman empires – were ‘imagined orders’. The social norms that sustained
them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances,
but rather on belief in shared myths.
How can myths sustain entire empires? We have already discussed one such
example: Peugeot. Now let’s examine two of the best-known myths of history: the
Code of Hammurabi of 
c
.1776 
BC
, which served as a cooperation manual for
hundreds of thousands of ancient Babylonians; and the American Declaration of
Independence of 1776 
AD
, which today still serves as a cooperation manual for
hundreds of millions of modern Americans.
In 1776 
BC
Babylon was the world’s biggest city. The Babylonian Empire was
probably the world’s largest, with more than a million subjects. It ruled most of
Mesopotamia, including the bulk of modern Iraq and parts of present-day Syria
and Iran. The Babylonian king most famous today was Hammurabi. His fame is

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due primarily to the text that bears his name, the Code of Hammurabi. This was a
collection of laws and judicial decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as
a role model of a just king, serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system across
the Babylonian Empire, and teach future generations what justice is and how a
just king acts.
Future generations took notice. The intellectual and bureaucratic elite of ancient
Mesopotamia canonised the text, and apprentice scribes continued to copy it long
after Hammurabi died and his empire lay in ruins. Hammurabi’s Code is therefore
a good source for understanding the ancient Mesopotamians’ ideal of social
order.
3
The text begins by saying that the gods Anu, Enlil and Marduk – the leading
deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon – appointed Hammurabi ‘to make justice
prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from
oppressing the weak’.
4
 It then lists about 300 judgements, given in the set formula
‘If such and such a thing happens, such is the judgment.’ For example, judgements
196–9 and 209–14 read:
196.
If a superior man should blind the eye of another superior man, they shall
blind his eye.
197.
If he should break the bone of another superior man, they shall break his
bone.
198.
If he should blind the eye of a commoner or break the bone of a
commoner, he shall weigh and deliver 60 shekels of silver.
199.
If he should blind the eye of a slave of a superior man or break the bone of
a slave of a superior man, he shall weigh and deliver one-half of the slave’s
value (in silver).
5
209.
If a superior man strikes a woman of superior class and thereby causes her
to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver ten shekels of silver for
her fetus.
210. If that woman should die, they shall kill his daughter.
211.
If he should cause a woman of commoner class to miscarry her fetus by the
beating, he shall weigh and deliver five shekels of silver.
212. If that woman should die, he shall weigh and deliver thirty shekels of

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silver.
213.
If he strikes a slave-woman of a superior man and thereby causes her to
miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver two shekels of silver.
214.
If that slave-woman should die, he shall weigh and deliver twenty shekels
of silver.
6
After listing his judgements, Hammurabi again declares that
These are the just decisions which Hammurabi, the able king, has established and thereby has directed the land
along the course of truth and the correct way of life … I am Hammurabi, noble king. I have not been careless or
negligent toward humankind, granted to my care by the god Enlil, and with whose shepherding the god Marduk
charged me.
7
Hammurabi’s Code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal and
eternal principles of justice, dictated by the gods. The principle of hierarchy is of
paramount importance. According to the code, people are divided into two
genders and three classes: superior people, commoners and slaves. Members of
each gender and class have di erent values. The life of a female commoner is
worth thirty silver shekels and that of a slave-woman twenty silver shekels,
whereas the eye of a male commoner is worth sixty silver shekels.
The code also establishes a strict hierarchy within families, according to which
children are not independent persons, but rather the property of their parents.
Hence, if one superior man kills the daughter of another superior man, the killer’s
daughter is executed in punishment. To us it may seem strange that the killer
remains unharmed whereas his innocent daughter is killed, but to Hammurabi and
the Babylonians this seemed perfectly just. Hammurabi’s Code was based on the
premise that if the king’s subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and
acted accordingly, the empire’s million inhabitants would be able to cooperate
e ectively. Their society could then produce enough food for its members,
distribute it e ciently, protect itself against its enemies, and expand its territory
so as to acquire more wealth and better security.
About 3,500 years after Hammurabi’s death, the inhabitants of thirteen British
colonies in North America felt that the king of England was treating them
unjustly. Their representatives gathered in the city of Philadelphia, and on 4 July
1776 the colonies declared that their inhabitants were no longer subjects of the
British Crown. Their Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal and
eternal principles of justice, which, like those of Hammurabi, were inspired by a

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divine power. However, the most important principle dictated by the American
god was somewhat di erent from the principle dictated by the gods of Babylon.
The American Declaration of Independence asserts that:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Like Hammurabi’s Code, the American founding document promises that if
humans act according to its sacred principles, millions of them would be able to
cooperate effectively, living safely and peacefully in a just and prosperous society.
Like the Code of Hammurabi, the American Declaration of Independence was not
just a document of its time and place – it was accepted by future generations as
well. For more than 200 years, American schoolchildren have been copying and
learning it by heart.
The two texts present us with an obvious dilemma. Both the Code of Hammurabi
and the American Declaration of Independence claim to outline universal and
eternal principles of justice, but according to the Americans all people are equal,
whereas according to the Babylonians people are decidedly unequal. The
Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is
wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, would retort that he is right, and that the
Americans are wrong. In fact, they are both wrong. Hammurabi and the American
Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable
principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such
universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths
they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and
commoners’ is a gment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are
equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any
objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? Are
all humans equal to one another biologically? Let us try to translate the most
famous line of the American Declaration of Independence into biological terms:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are