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0:01 [Music] did you know that Humanity's first legal code was written almost 4,000 years ago and it still influences our societies today one of the first legal codes in human history is called the code of hom Robi and it provides fascinating insights into what ancient people thought about the world and how they chose to organize their lives this is so cool because up until this point we've had to rely on archaeological ruins and artifacts to try to figure out what ancient people thought and felt but now we know what ancient people were actually thinking because they wrote it down have you ever visited a really
0:48 really old city maybe in the Middle East or Asia or Europe in some of these old cities you can actually read the history of the place through the architecture here's an example of one I saw in civil Spain and these are my three daughters when they were little in this case you can see by the arch and the columns that the Romans were there first then the Moors came and built on top of those Roman arches and then you can see evidence of the Catholics with their bell tower on top social structures practices and ideas work much the same way especially once they're written down picture it this way let's say a person observes a variety of people with different talents in their community community and they make an observation it seems like there are different kinds
1:34 of people in the world and they're just suited to do different things people might agree with that idea and say yeah that makes sense so they write it down the Next Generation might take it a step further and say people should only be allowed to do what they're suited to do and before you know it three generations down the line there are very strict rules that dictate what certain people should or shouldn't be allowed to do each idea get added to the stack and no one even remembers who came up with the foundational ideas in the first place it's just so easy to adopt the ideas we inherit without questioning them here's another thing about ancient cities they were built during a time
2:19 when they only needed to accommodate people walking and maybe the occasional donkey and in fact when we lived in Spain one time we drove up the wrong Street and our van literally got wedged in between buildings with our mirrors scraping walls on both sides again these cities were built a really long time ago when people had very different needs but the city just keeps getting built on those same foundations the buildings might get an update or a remodel but the city grid stays the same generation after generation it was built for donkeys not Vans Human Society can work just like this we can find ourselves living in idea and systems that feel narrow and constricted and don't serve the needs of the people living in them
3:06 today these constructs whether buildings or ideas took thousands of years to build and no one even remembers how they started and often people are too scared or set in their ways to question whether they can change so let's take the social construct of patriarchy the good news is the foundations of patriarchy were built so long ago that no living person can be blamed for them men you are off the hook you did not invent patriarchy however while we are not responsible for the systems we inherit we are all responsible for what we do with the systems we inherit let's pick up where we left off last time with what historians call the rise of civilization
3:52 in Mesopotamia remember Mesopotamia was the area around the tigress and Euphrates rivers in what we now call Iraq and it is an area that holds a lot of humans earliest written records as people began to organize themselves into complicated societies Mesopotamians got really good at producing goods and trading with other people in distant regions this led to people accumulating wealth and they started forming social hierarchies based on class the halves and the hav knots if you will at the top of the hierarchy was an Elite Class of kings and male milit Ary leaders and at the bottom we start to see evidence of people enslaving other people to do their work and what about the women it turns out that by the time the first
4:39 laws that we know about were written women had already been subjugated for a long time here's a quick overview of gender constructs in Mesopotamian law number one the patriarchal family unit was the official building block of society with men heading each household number two men excluded women from certain occup patients and professions number three formal education had just been established think of it people were just starting to write so they established schools and Men excluded women from equal access to that education it makes me wonder if women were speaking out about these laws and it seems like they were because during the reign of King urukagina in around 2,000 BCE there was a law established
5:25 that if a woman speaks disrespectfully to a man that woman's mouth is crushed with a fired brick and it gets even worse from there let's look at two of the most famous and best preserved collections of Mesopotamian law the code of hamurabi and the middle Assyrian laws king hamurabi lived from about 1792 bcee until 1750 BCE in the area known as Babylon he was the first ruler who was able to successfully govern all of Mesopotamia and he's best known for his famous law code and these laws came to serve as a model for others including the Hebrew scribes who wrote the Bible here's an excerpt from the code of hamurabi if a man put out the eye of
6:11 another man his eye shall be put out if he break another man's bone his bone shall be broken if a man knock out the teeth of his equal his teeth shall be knocked out sound familiar can you think of another legal code that might have been built on that how about this one if a man's wife has been pointed out because of another man Even though she has not been caught with him for her husband's sake she must plunge into the river women were considered the property of their husbands so if a woman committed adultery she was put to death if she was accused of adultery pointed out as they say in the code but they didn't know if she did it they had a method to see if she was guilty they plunged her into a
6:57 river and if she could swim and she survived she was innocent and if she died she was guilty ring a bell let's move on to the middle Assyrian laws these laws were developed by the Assyrians between about 1450 BC and 1250 BCE which is known as the late Mesopotamian era and here are some examples a man May whip his wife pluck her hair May bruise and Destroy her ears there is no liability therefore but the tearing out of the breasts and cutting off the nose or ears must be carried out by an official the implication here is that before this law was written men used to take the legal punishments of their wives into their own hands but now
7:44 tearing out the breasts or cutting off the nose or the ears were for public crimes so they needed to be carried out by the state not by husbands but the other stuff like whipping was fine for the husband to do do we still see this today you're lucky I didn't kill you what did you say in the United States a man could legally beat his wife until 1920 and protective laws were not reliably enforced until the 1970s even today in 49 countries there is no specific law prohibiting domestic violence and in 112 countries marital rape is not considered a crime
8:30 112 One Challenge in changing the laws is that in these countries men comprise almost the entire government structure and violence against women is so normalized that men don't feel an incentive to go to the trouble to change the laws and another heartbreaking challenge is that girls who grow up seeing men beat women believe that it's normal and that they deserve it next see if you can spot a connection in Middle Assyrian law 53 if a woman causes her own miscarriage and proof has been brought against her she shall be impaled and shall not be buried let me restate that the woman would be impaled and not be buried now it might be tempting to assume that this culture punished women so severely for ending
9:16 pregnancy because they cared about babies but no Assyrian law also states that if a baby was unwanted and that usually meant a female child then the father could leave it out in the elements to die that wasn't even considered a crime however if a woman was the one to perform an abortion on a fetus the king himself had to be informed and she was impaled and not buried and by the way impalement and the refusal of burial were the severest penalties in the middle Assyrian legal system reserved for the most egregious crimes historian Gera learner explains why she says the Savage punishment against self-abortion has to do with the connection between the power of the king
10:01 or state and the power of the patriarchal family head over his wives and children the right of the father to decide over the lives of his infant children is equated with the keeping of social order for the wife to usurp such a right is now seen as equal in magnitude to treason or to an assault upon the king the control of female sexuality had become a matter of State regulation so so what current laws might be built upon this Foundation when an unwanted pregnancy occurs who has the right to decide what should happen the woman with the pregnancy or the male dominated State comprising a group of men who have never met her this makes me wonder what if Mesopotamians had written
10:46 laws that said women are the only ones who bear pregnancy so women are The Logical agents to make those decisions what if their laws had said men and women are equal before the law how about about no husband May ever pluck his wife's hair or destroy her ears or while we're at it how about nobody ever plucks anybody's hair destroys anybody's nose or ears do you think Society might have evolved differently if those earliest written laws had been more egalitarian in their content I do and I wonder just how different things might be today if different choices had been made way back when those First Foundation Stones were being laid and although we can't go back and change the foundations upon which
11:33 our societies have been built we don't have to keep building on them we can imagine clear open land where we can build something new that meets our needs today something that keeps us all safe and gives us all enough room to move around all of us the whole Human family and here's something you can do to help me out I actually kind of hate saying like And subscribe but the truth is the more people subscribe the more likely it is that these videos will pop up in someone else's feed and then more people are educated about the history of patriarchy so if you appreciate these videos please like And subscribe thank
12:20 you
