Category History

We know exactly all the 282 laws in which King Hammurabi included the entire legal traditions of his day because they were found on a stele (stone slab) discovered at Susa in 1901 and now preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The laws were written on the slab in a writing known as cuneiform. The slab also has a fine piece of sculpture depicting Samas, the god of justice, looking into the eyes of king Hammurabi as if to inspire him.

Babylonian society was divided into three distinct classes: the patricians, the plebeians, and the slaves. Justice depended on the class to which a person belonged. For example, an article in Hammurabi’s legal code said: ‘If a patrician, one of his eyes also shall be taken. If he breaks the bone of another patrician, one of his bones too shall be broken.’

If, however, the person hurt was a plebeian, matters were different. The law said: ‘If a patrician takes the eye or breaks a bone of a plebeian, he will pay a mine of silver.’ Of course, the penalty was smaller if a slave was involved. These laws seem very unfair to us today but the penalties inflicted are midway between the brutality of the Assyrian laws and the comparative lenience of the Hittites. We must remember that in the social conditions of Hammurabi’s day such laws were needed to curb the vices and passions of the Babylonians.

Hammurabi died but his dynasty, or family, continued to rule for another 150 years although it never reached the same peak of glory as it had in his day.

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The Etruscans were a very religious people. Their chief gods were Tinia, Uni, Minrva, the trio worshipped by the ancient Romans later under the names of Jove, Juno and Minerva. Only some of the Etruscan gods had the power to launch thunderbolts. Tinia was one of the more powerful of the divinities.

Religious ceremonies were conducted by priests who formed a very powerful class in Etruscan society. These priests were the only persons permitted to divine or guess the will of the gods and to tell the future. They did this in various ways: by bird watching; by observing lightening and other weather phenomena; and the ebbing and flowing of streams.

Of all the entrails the liver was studied with the greatest care. A bronze model of a liver found at the city of Piacenza is divided into forty-five areas, each with the name of a presiding deity written in it. The priests who studied birds traced the will of the gods from the way birds flew, cried and ate. The signs seen by these priests were known as auguries which could be either good or bad.

The Etruscan religion comprised a complicated set of beliefs and ceremonies for every act in public life. The laws relating to the foundation of a city were particularly strict.

The Etruscan believed, especially in their early days, that when they died they passed on to another life similar to the one in this world. They provided the dead with many objects of everyday life and the statues on their tombs depict people sitting at table with guests or playing music, singing or even hunting.

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The Middle Ages were a period of European history which occurred approximately between the fall of the western Roman Empire in A.D. 476 and the discovery of America in 1942.

During the first three centuries of the Middle Ages, the way people dressed underwent many changes. In the early stages they dressed in the Byzantine fashion: the emperor and the empress wore long tunics in brocade covered with a pallium, a sort of heavy square mantle that had a religious significance. Men let their beards grow and woman never out their hair.

When knights prepared for battle they put on a thick woollen tunic over which they donned their coat of armour or chain mail. They had a broad belt or buckler round their waist from which hung a broad sword. The bandolier went on the right shoulder. On the head was worn an iron helmet, usually with a nose guard, and at the end of the twelfth century the great cylindrical helmet was introduced.

The soldier’s dress was completed with a large convex shield on which the knight had his coat-of-arms painted or carved. These arms also decorated the linen surcoat which after about 1200 was worn over the mail shirt.

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Knighthood began as a military rank. After A.D. 1000 it become a more complicated institution and one of the glorious features of the middle Ages, the standards of which were both military and religious. One became a knight through birth into the nobility or through bravery in battle. Knights had the right to fight on horseback and this right was bestowed on them in a ceremony by the king. In this ceremony the recipient of the honour would kneel before his sovereign who would touch him on the shoulder with a sword.

The younger children of a feudal lord became knights but first they had to serve a period of service when they were known as squires. The training for knighthood began at twelve years of age. The young squire was taught to ride, to fence and to handle the bow; he also learned to hunt with falcons and dogs. In his teens, the squire had to act as an assistant to a knight, and this was his true apprenticeship. His duties included swerving his master at table, looking after his master’s horse and weapons, carrying his shield and helping him in battle.

At the age of about twenty the squire became a knight. He spent the whole night before the ceremony awake and in prayer, guarding his arms. This was known as the vigil. Today knighthood is bestowed on persons by the monarch for outstanding contributions in all spheres of life such as industry, science and the arts. The ceremony of touching the shoulder with the sword is still the same. Knights have the title ‘Sir’ before their Christian names.

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The word ‘mummy’ comes from an ancient Egyptian word meaning ‘tar’ or ‘bitumen’. Egyptian embalmers used many products in their craft such as bees-wax, cassia (a type of cinnamon), juniper oil, onions, palm wine, resin salt, sawdust, pitch, soda and bitumen to keep the corpses of the rich and the mighty from rotting.

The bodies were wrapped in linen bandages, clothed in funerary garments and adorned with necklaces and amulets. On the face of the deceased there was placed a mask made of rough canvas and chalk, but for dead pharaohs and high dignitaries this mask was made of gold. Poor people were mummified in any haphazard way and paupers were simply thrown without ceremony into a common grave.

The embalmed body of the deceased was buried together with objects which that person had used during his earthly life and which he might need in the next. Naturally, the graves of the dead reflected their social status during life. He tombs of the pharaohs were magnificent structures full of precious treasures and costly objects.

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Excavations have made it possible for us to know how the Vikings built their ships. The fighting ships or longships were shallow, narrow in the beam and pointed at both ends. They had a single large, square sail, although they used oars as well, a high prow and a projecting stern. The figurehead of the ship of about A.D.800, understand at Oseberg, was a coiled snake with its head upreared. Another Viking ship, found at Gokstad, dates from about A.D.900.

Longships had about ten oars a side and seem to have carried twice as many men for fighting as for rowing, that would be a total of some sixty men.

The most famous of the longships was the ‘big dragon’ of King Canute, Built in A.D. 1004. It looked like a huge sea serpent, with a dragon’s head at the prow and a high-coiled tail at the stern.

The Viking hafskip had fewer rowers than the longship and was sometimes more than 21 metres long and 6 metres wide. On voyages of colonization it would carry wives, children, livestock, stores and as many as thirty men.

The naval power of the Vikings was greatly helped by their levy system which allowed them to call up men to form one of the greatest war fleets of their day.

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