point of the jaw'. The instrument, in his view, was an antelope humerus.92 In the proto-Neolithic period, four 'staggeringly powerful' new weapons appeared 'that would dominate warfare down to the present millennium: the bow, the sling, the dagger and the mace'.93 Cave paintings from Spain show warriors carrying bows and arrows, the leader marked out by a more fancy headdress. Other paintings show archers arrayed into a firing line. 'The appearance of the column and line, which imply command and organisation, is synonymous with the invention of tactics.'94 Other paintings depict what appears to be protective clothing-armour-over the warriors' knees, genitals and shoulders. Slings are shown being used at Catal Huyuk and the spread of fortified sites took place all over the Middle East from 8000-4000 BC.95 There was no golden age of peace. By the time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the pharaohs could put armies of up to 20,000 in the field. This implied vast organisation and logistical support. For comparison, at Agincourt (1415) 6,000-7,000 Englishmen defeated a French force of 25,000 and in the battle of New Orleans (1815) 4,000 Americans defeated 9,000 British troops. The introduction of the chariot meant that rapid reaction was more necessary than ever, which in turn provoked the idea of standing armies. In Egypt the army comprised professional soldiers, foreign mercenaries (Nubians, in this case) and, sometimes, conscripts. The title, 'overseer of soldiers' was equivalent to our term 'general', of whom, at any one time, there were about fifteen.96 Conscripts were recruited by special officers who toured the country and were empowered to take one in a hundred men. Assyria's awesome power as a fighting nation was due to two factors over and above the chariot: iron and cavalry. Iron, in particular the Assyrians' discovery of how to introduce carbon into red-hot iron to produce carburised, or steel-like, iron favoured the development of the sword- with a sharp edge-as opposed to the dagger, with a point.97 Given that the horse was not indigenous to Assyria, the measures they adopted to acquire animals was extraordinary. This was revealed in 1974 by Nicholas Postgate, a professor at Cambridge, in his Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire . He showed that around 2,000 'horse reports' were written daily, addressed to the king, who had two men in every province specifically searching out horses and transporting them to the capital. Collectively, these agents, or musarkisus , sent around one hundred animals per day to Nineveh over a period of three months. Nearly three thousand animals are mentioned in the Horse Reports, of which 1,840 are 'yoke' or chariot horses, and 787 are riding or cavalry horses. 'Though the Assyrians were the classic charioteers of all time, the more mobile cavalry would soon displace them, and from around 1200 BC formed the elite of the world's armies until the arrival of the tank in the First World War, in 1918.'98 One of the duties of the king in Mesopotamia was the administration of justice. (In the early cities, injustice was considered an offence against the gods.99) For centuries, it was thought that the most ancient laws in the world were those of the Old Testament, concerning Moses. At the start of the twentieth century, however, this idea was overturned, when French archaeologists excavating at Susa in south-west Iran in 1901 and 1902 unearthed a black basalt stele over eight feet high (now in the Louvre), which proved to be inscribed with the law code of the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, who ruled early in the second millennium. The upper section showed the king praying to a god, either Marduk, the sun-god, or Shamash, the god of justice, seated on a throne. The rest of the stone, front and back, was carved with horizontal columns of the most beautiful cuneiform.100 Since the French discovery, the origins of law have been pushed back a number of times but it suits us to consider this sequence in reverse order because the evolution of legal concepts becomes clearer. Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC) was an adventurous and successful king. His capital was at Babylon, where he centralised the local cults in the worship of Marduk.101 As part of this he simplified and unified the bureaucracy throughout his realm, including the legal system. Altogether, nearly three hundred laws are now known from Hammurabi's code, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. They are arranged in this way: offences against property (twenty sections), trade and commercial transactions (nearly forty sections), the family (sixty-eight sections, covering adultery, concubinage, desertion, divorce, incest, adoption, inheritance), wages and rates of hire (ten sections), ownership of slaves (five sections).
Hammurabi's laws, as H. W. Saggs tells us, take one of two forms, apodictic and casuistic. Apodictic laws are absolute prohibitions, such as 'Thou shalt not kill.' Casuistic laws are of the type: 'If a man delivers to his neighbour money or goods to keep, and it is stolen out of the man's house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay double.' The prologue makes it plain that Hammurabi's laws were intended to be exhibited in public, where citizens could read them, or have them read out.102 They are not what we would understand as statutes: they are royal decisions, a range of typical examples rather than a formal statement of principles. Hammurabi meant the code to apply across all of Babylonia, replacing earlier local laws that differed from area to area. From the code we can see that, legally speaking, Babylonian society was split into three classes: free men ( awelu ), mushkenu , and slaves ( wardu ). The mushkenum were privileged, in that some military or civilian duty was performed in exchange for certain advantages. For instance, the fee for a life-saving operation was set at ten shekels of silver for an awelum , five for a mushkenum and two for a slave (## 215-217). Similarly, 'if a man has pierced the eye of an awelum , they shall pierce his eye', but 'if he has pierced the eye or broken the bone of a mushkenum , he shall pay one mina of silver' (## 196-198). Punishments were cruel by our standards but the objectives were not so different. Family law was designed to protect women and children from arbitrary treatment and to prevent poverty and neglect. Thus, although a wife's adultery was punishable by death, her husband could always pardon her and the king could pardon her lover. This saved them 'from being bound together and thrown into the river' (# 129).103 Just as many Sumerian and Babylonian literary narratives prefigured those in the Bible, so did Hammurabi's laws anticipate Moses'. For example: Hammurabi's Laws, # 117 reads: 'If a debt has brought about the seizure of a man and he has delivered his wife or his son or his daughter for silver, or has delivered them as persons distrained for debt, for three years they shall serve in the house of the buyer or distrainer; in the fourth year their freedom shall be established.' Compare that with Deuteronomy 15:12, 18: 'If your brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go from you.' In places the Hammurabi code refers to judges and discusses the conditions under which they could be disqualified. This sounds as though they were professionals, who were paid by the state. They worked either in the temples or at the gates, in particular those dedicated to the god of justice, Shamash. However, the king was always the court of appeal, and intervened whenever he wanted to. The Babylonians were less concerned with an abstract theory of justice, and more with finding an acceptable solution that did not disrupt society. For example, the two parties in a case were required to swear they were satisfied with the verdicts and would not pursue vendetta.104 When a case came before the judges, there was no advocacy, and no cross-examination. The court first examined any relevant documents and then heard statements by the accuser, the accused and any witnesses. Anyone giving evidence took an oath by the gods and if a conflict of testimony arose, it was settled by recourse to the ordeal-that is, the rival witnesses were forced to jump into the river, the idea being that the fear of divine wrath would pressure the lying party to confess. It seems to have worked, since the practice of ordeal was still in use in biblical times where it is mentioned in Numbers.105 This all sounds very well organised and carefully thought out. It is important to add, therefore, that there is no direct evidence that Hammurabi's code was ever adopted, and that no extant legal rulings of the period refer to his system. But Hammurabi's famous code is no longer the oldest set of laws we have. In the 1940s an earlier code, written in Sumerian, was discovered.106 This had been set down by Lipit-Ishtar (1934-1924 BC) of Isin, a city which was prominent in southern Mesopotamia after the fall of Ur. It too contains a prologue which speaks of the gods raising Lipit-Ishtar to power 'to establish justice in the land...to bring well-being to the people of Sumer and Akkad'. The two dozen or so laws are more limited in scope than Hammurabi's, covering ownership of land, including theft from or damage to an orchard, runaway slaves, inheritance, betrothal and marriage, injury to hired animals. Land ownership brought privileges but also responsibilities. For example, # 11 reads: 'If next to a man's estate, another man's uncultivated land lies waste and the householder has told the owner of the uncultivated land, "Because your land lies waste someone may break into my estate; safeguard your estate", and this agreement is confirmed by him, the