owner of the uncultivated land shall make good to the owner of the estate any of his property that is lost.'107 In the 1950s and 1960s even earlier laws were discovered, deriving from Ur-Nammu, who founded the Third Dynasty of Ur at about 2100 BC. The fragment discovered deals with abuses in taxation and setting up standard weights and measures, but it also has a strong statement of principle, in this case to block the exploitation of the economically weak by the strong: 'The orphan was not given over to the rich man; the widow not given over to the powerful man; the man of one shekel was not given over to the man of one mina.'108 The laws of Ur-Nammu make no attempt at being a systematic code, governed by abstract legal principles. They are based on actual cases. Also, unlike the laws of Hammurabi and the Bible, there is no idea of the lex talionis , the principle of an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, as punishment for causing bodily injury.109 Talion seems to have been a more primitive form of law, despite its presence in the Bible (a relatively late document, legally speaking). In the Hittite laws ( c . 1700-1600 BC), for example, the penalty for stealing a beehive was 'exposure to a bee sting', but this was replaced later by a fine.110 But again, all this may make ancient justice sound more organised, and more modern, than it really was. The earliest 'code' we now have is that of Uruinimgina of Lagash but he, like the others, may simply have attempted to alleviate the traditional injustices of ancient society, which were always threatening to get out of hand. Uruinimgina's reforms, like the others, may have been as much royal propaganda as real. Kingships emerged in societies that were changing rapidly and were very competitive. Kings themselves liked to interfere in the administration of justice-it was one of the ways they showed their power. Justice was probably nowhere near as clearly organised as the idealised codes make it appear. There is evidence of a development in abstract thought in the Mesopotamian cities. To begin with, for example, early counting systems applied only to specific commodities-i.e., the symbol for 'three sheep' applied only to sheep and was different from that for 'three cows'. There was no symbol for '3' in and of itself (in Umberto Eco's well-known phrase, 'There were no nude names in Uruk times').111 The same was true of measuring. Later, however, words for abstract qualities-such as number, the measurement of volume in abstract units (hollow spaces), and geometrical shapes (such as triangularity)-emerged. So too did the use of the word LU , to mean 'human being, individual of the human species'.112 Hardly less momentous was the development of the concept of private property, as evidenced by extra-mural cemeteries which, it seems, were confined to individuals from particular communities.113 Yet another important 'first' of the Babylonians. It was thus in these first cities that LU , human beings, discovered a genius for art, literature, trade, law- and many other new things. We call it civilisation and we are apt to think of it as reflected in the physical remains of temples, castles and palaces that we see about us. But it was far more than that. It was a great experiment in living together, which sparked a whole new psychological experience, one that, even today, continues to excite many more of us than the alternatives. Cities have been the forcing houses of ideas, of thought, of innovation, in almost all the ways that have pushed life forward. PART TWO ISAIAH TO ZHU XI The Romance of the Soul 5 Sacrifice, Soul, Saviour: ' the Spiritual Breakthrough' To Chapter 5 Notes and References In 1975 the British archaeologist Peter Warren excavated a small building that formed part of the Knossos complex in Crete. Knossos was the main site of the Minoan, bull-worshipping civilisation, dating to 2000 BC, which was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. The building excavated by Warren had at some stage been the victim of an earthquake, making it more difficult than usual to 'read' the rubble. Despite this, he soon came across the scattered bones of four children aged between eight and twelve. Many of the bone fragments bore the tell-tale knife marks that resulted from de-fleshing of the bones. More children's bones were found in an adjoining room, 'one of them a vertebra bearing a knife-cut pathologists associate with slitting of the throat'.1 Warren concluded that the remains were those of children who had been sacrificed to avert a great disaster-perhaps the very earthquake that was so soon upon them. Of all the beliefs and practices in ancient religion, sacrifice-both animal and human, and even of kings-is the most striking, certainly from a modern standpoint. In our examination of the origins of religion, among the Palaeolithic painted caves and Venus figurines, and around the time that worship of the Great Goddess and the Bull began, we find no traces of sacrifice. However, by the time of the first great civilisations-in Sumer, Egypt, Mohenjo-Daro and China-it was widely practised and proved very durable: human sacrifice was abolished in parts of India only in the nineteenth century AD.*2 Surveys of ancient texts, decorations on temple and palace walls, on pottery and mosaics, together with anthropological surveys among nineteenth- and twentieth-century tribes across the world, have confirmed the widespread variety of sacrificial practices (the difference between religious sacrifice and magical sacrifice is discussed in the notes). In Mexico children were sacrificed so that their tears would encourage rain.3 In other cultures people with physical abnormalities were selected for sacrifice. A not-uncommon form of sacrifice is for a pig to be slaughtered. This sends a message to the gods, who are deemed to have replied according to the state of the pig's liver. (The liver is the bloodiest organ and blood was often identified with the life force.) If we can say that the ideas of the Great Goddess, the Bull and sacred stones are the earliest core ideas of many religions, they were followed by a second constellation of beliefs that were all in place before the great faiths that are still dominant today were conceived. Sacrifice was the most striking of this second set of ideas. A sacrifice is, at its most basic, two things. It is a gift and it is the link between man and the spiritual world. It is an attempt either to coerce the gods, so they will behave as we wish them to behave, or to propitiate them, to defuse their anger, to get, get rid of, to atone. This much is easy to understand. What requires a fuller explanation is the actual form that sacrifice takes, and has taken in the past. Why must animals or humans be killed? Why is it that blood must be shed? How did such an ostensibly cruel practice take root and become widespread? Did ancient people see sacrifice as cruel? Sacrifice originated at a time when ancient man regarded all that he experienced-even the rocks, rivers and mountains as a form of life. In India hair was sacred because it continued to grow after a person's death and so was judged to have a life of its own.4 Vedic Aryans regarded the actual leaping fire as a living thing, swallowing oblations.5 Most important, perhaps, sacrifice dates from an era when the rhythms of the world were observed but not understood. It was these rhythms, the very notion of periodicity, that were the basis of religion: such patterns were the expression of mysterious forces.