Mesopotamia Case Study

Over time, civilizations tend to evolve and change for the better. Over many centuries, many nations and empires have risen and fallen. Two of these ancient civilizations were Mesopotamia and Greece. In Mesopotamia, there was a city called Babylon which lived under the laws of the Code of Hammurabi, written in 1780 B.C. In Athens, Greece, Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who wrote a book called Politics, describing the laws and the type of government the people of Athens lived under in 350 B.C. These two ancient civilizations were 1,430 years apart from each other. In those 1,430 years, one can conclude that politics and laws would have advanced since the time of Babylon. By the time of Aristotle, the Greek laws were far less harsher than those of Babylon. In the Code of Hammurabi, used in Mesopotamia, almost every law that was broken was punishable by death. When this code was written, it was better for one to be a man or a slave than it was to be a woman. Most of these laws protected men, some protected slaves and very few only protected women. The only women protected by this code were pregnant women. There was only

There were no codes that protected young girls or women who were not pregnant. If a son is to strike his father, his hands are to be chopped off. Even if no one witnesses these actions, the father is still obligated to turn him in. If someone takes the eye of a slave or breaks a bone of the slave, he should pay half of the slave’s value. Some of the laws state that whatever be done to one person is to be done to the other. If a man hits a pregnant women and she loses her child, that man will have to pay 10 shekels for the loss of her baby, but if the women dies, the daughter of the man who hit the women will be put to death (). For example, if a man takes an eye of another man, that man’s eye will be removed. This law states an eye for an