🌊 Ripple · counterfactual
What if the Code of Hammurabi had gone differently?
-1754 · middle-east
A Babylonian king has 282 laws carved in stone where his subjects can see them.
If it had gone differently: Law stays the private memory of kings and priests; the idea of a public, written, predictable rule arrives centuries late.
What it made possible
Later turning points that leaned on the Code of Hammurabi. Change it in the game and the ripples reach all of these.
- -509The Roman Republic. Without it, Italy stays a patchwork of small kingdoms; there is no republic, no Senate, no working model of citizenship for Europe to inherit.
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