Tag: law

The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. The Sumerians established the outlines of our political, legal, and temporal structures too, with the first kings and assemblies, the first written laws, the first legal contracts, and the sexagesimal system of counting that regulates the hours and seconds of our days.

The Sumerians wrote the first epics and constructed the first monumental buildings. They invented the wheel, the sailing boat, the dome, and the arch. They were the first people to cast, rivet, and solder metals. They were the first to develop mathematics, calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle two thousand years before Pythagoras and enabling extraordinary achievements in civil engineering. Compiling methodical lists of plants and animals, the Sumerians were the first people to apply rational order to our knowledge of the natural world.

The Sumerians wrote down almost everything they knew, much of it on disposable clay tablets that have survived the millennia. Some thirty-nine centuries after the last of the Sumerians died, another inventive and curious people, the Victorians of the nineteenth century [C.E.], initiated a remarkable period of foreign exploration in Iraq. Thanks to this colorful and dramatic intellectual adventure, which began in the 1840s, today we can follow the course of Sumerian lawsuits, track Sumerian inventories, and study the terms of Sumerian marriages, wills, and loans. We read the overtures of Sumer’s diplomats. We follow in detail the provisioning of Sumer’s armies and the triumphs or disasters of their expeditions. We know intimately the pleadings of Sumerian students for more money from their fathers, and the pleadings of their fathers for more diligence from their sons. We track the transactions of Sumerian merchants in copper or onions. We admire the complex and perfect calculations of Sumerian engineers.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

What was the “system of noble combat?” It rested on a basic legal idea very alien to the modern mind: the idea that there was an intimate connection between high social status and the right to do violence. As [historian Jonathan] Dewald writes, the pre-eighteenth-century nobility had “habits of violence, public and private.” More than that, they had as a matter of law privileges of violence. Nobles were marked off from their social inferiors not just by their titles, not just by their dress, not just by their wealth, but also by their privileges, symbolic or real, of inflicting violence on others. Historically these privileges of public and private violence included “high justice” (the privilege of sentencing dependents to death), the privilege of hunting, the privilege of thrashing inferiors, and the complex privilege that goes by the name of “the right to bear arms.” The character of these privileges varied over the centuries, but from the central Middle Ages onward the symbolism of the law of noble status was consistently a symbolism of the “right of the stronger,” as the medievalist Wolfgang Schild has put it. Noble status was largely defined and displayed by the right, whether or not exercised, to commit violent acts.

[Historian Johan] Huizinga’s “noble combat” was prominent among these symbolically charged privileges. High status was partly defined by the privilege of doing violence not only to inferiors but also between equals, and aristocracy, as one medievalist has said, with a shade of exaggeration, was based “first and foremost on the capacity to assert oneself in and through combat.” In that sense, engaging in combat was closely akin to such acts as sentencing one’s dependents to death: it was a resonant marker of high status rich in the symbolism of “the right of the stronger.”

— The Verdict of Battle, pp. 141

Author’s emphasis in italic. Mine is in bold.

“The living fight the living. The dead fight the dead. They are not to fight each other. This is the Law.” — Xenograg