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Yuval Noah Harari
Hammurabi was a Mesopotamian emperor who invented Hammurabi’s Code 3,500 years ago. The code argues that people are born into different categories: aristocrats, commoners, and slaves, and that its their duty to fulfil the role they’re born into. Hammurabi’s Code gives every person in a society a clear role to play—and compels them to stick to that role—thereby facilitating widespread cooperation. Harari thinks Hammurabi’s Code is an imagined order, which is a set of rules that lays out how people should cooperate in a society. According to Harari, Hammurabi’s code is incredibly effective because it convinces people to cooperate with strangers on a mass scale. However, Harari emphasizes that it's not necessarily true that everyone in society is assigned a clear-cut social role at birth and shouldn’t stray from it, nor is this fair to those who are categorized as slaves or even commoners. Through the example of Hammurabi’s Code, Harari makes the broader point that imagined orders aren’t necessarily true or fair, but people nevertheless believe in them.
Hammurabi Quotes in Sapiens
The Sapiens quotes below are all either spoken by Hammurabi or refer to Hammurabi . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6 Quotes
Hammurabi’s Code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal and eternal principles of justice, dictated by the gods.
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Chapter 8 Quotes
The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.
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Hammurabi Quotes in Sapiens
The Sapiens quotes below are all either spoken by Hammurabi or refer to Hammurabi . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6 Quotes
Hammurabi’s Code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal and eternal principles of justice, dictated by the gods.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes
The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
