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Did people back then have no sense of structure or desire to group the laws thematically? This text jumps back and forth between topics.
by mseepgood 2y ago
Did people back then have no sense of structure or desire to group the laws thematically? This text jumps back and forth between topics.
- krapp 2y agoI'm sure there is a structure and a theme that we don't understand because it's been lost to several thousand years of time and cultural context, just as we no longer get the ancient Sumerian joke "A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I can't see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”
- drcode 2y agoI'm no expert, but one would imagine the list grew organically, adding new laws as they became necessary, like an append-only data structure.
- idoubtit 2y agoFrom the millions of tablets the historians have analysed, we know that Babylonian (educated) people loved lists. I've heard an Assyriologist make fun of it in his course. There are lists for everything: events, vegetables, mathematical results, year names, Sumerian gods... As far as I know, they're always flat lists. Some of them, like some intended for rote learning, have an obvious order. In many cases, Historian don't understand the order. But it may be there, just hidden: e.g. Hammurabi's articles could be sorted by chronological date. Or according to omens...