For thousands of years, the view that only rulers conferred rights or privileges on everyone else was taken for granted in traditional societies around the world. In the ancient empires of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, only those whom rulers regarded as their peers had value, or what the Romans called dignitas. Hindu societies enshrined the ruler as one who embodies the divine order of the gods, and established a hierarchical rank for everyone else. The caste system even defined some people as “outcaste,” with no right to move freely and little recourse from lifelong servitude.
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The anonymous Babylonian scribes who wrote the legal code of Hammurabi some 4,000 years ago seem to have regarded human value as a quality that the king could grant to certain people and deny to others. This code assigned privileges, and what we call “rights,” according to a strictly hierarchical view of social power.
The archaeologists who discovered Hammurabi’s code must have been surprised, at first,
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