Documents That Changed the World is an ongoing podcast series by UW Information School Professor Joe Janes that explores the compelling stories of various documents from throughout history.
Janes aims to take things that are less known or appreciated and tell their stories in a slightly different way; to leave people with something new to think about, with a background or perspective they didn’t consider.
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The Mètre des Archives, a bar of solid platinum, forged and officially adopted by the Convention in Paris in 1799.
“How far did you say it was again? A couple of blocks, more or less?” Picture us, wandering the streets of Paris, looking for a stone shelf set into a wall, across from the Luxembourg Gardens, 36 rue Vaugirard to be exact, on a warm summer’s afternoon several years ago. I’d read about it and it seemed like one of those quirky things one does on vacation when you can’t stand Yet Another Cathedral. So my dutiful husband follows me around – love may not always be blind, though it is patient – and eventually we find it, and thus the picture of me standing next to the last remaining original mètre étalon, a standard meter installed in 1796 to enable citizens to calibrate their own measuring devices.
Now after a couple of centuries of wear and tear, that meter is pretty rough now, and while it sufficed, it was never terribly precise, and certainly not as precise as the standard meter that came after that, or the one after that, or the one after that, or the one after that. This is a not-terribly-long story about a not-terribly-short stick that took about a century to have implications far and wide, once almost everybody agreed on it.
A document that changed the world: The Mètre des Archives, a bar of solid platinum, forged and officially adopted by the Convention in Paris, 1799
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and if you’re the sort of person who thinks that “I love you, a bushel and a peck” is insufficiently specific, you’ve come to the right place. Bushels and pecks are but 2 of the hundreds and thousands of units of measurement invented since time immemorial. Linear and area measurements likely came first; one book on metrology lists 63 historical examples in its index, acres, cords, fathoms, furlongs, rods, thumbs, yards, 8 different kinds of cubit, a whole bunch you’ve never heard of, and of course feet, which are obvious because, well, most of us have them and there they are, and much the same could be said for lots of early measurements based on the proportions of the human body. But – which body, or more to the point, whose? Egyptian “standard” cubits, used for reference in building, were based on the length of the pharaoh’s arm from elbow to tip of middle finger, plus the span of his hand; the yard derived from the length of King Henry I’s arm; his great-grandson Henry III established the weight of a penny to be 32 grains of wheat, taken from the middle of the ear, and an ounce to be 20 pennies, and 12 ounces make the London pound. Got it? Many of these standards were established by edict or decree and some were “published” in a sense: We have Egyptian royal cubits made of wood, and a Roman foot made of bronze, there was a set of metal weights established by Charlemagne. Some emerged from everyday, often local, practice; areas were often measured in terms of how much land could be plowed and by a man with an ox in a given day, and thus might be different in size for different crops and in different places.
As you might have guessed, our story takes us back to France, in this case Revolutionary France which was, um, revolutionary – and not exclusively in political terms, but we’ll get there shortly. July 14 of 1789 the Bastille falls; 3 weeks later, on the 4th of August, the new National Assembly abolishes the feudal system, which meant that the collection of over 700 units of measurement often used for fraud and abuse effectively went with it, so yay for liberty but what do we do now? No less a figure than Talleyrand, the notorious side-switcher, then a bishop who had supported the appropriation of church property, eventually to lead the French delegation to the Congress of Vienna, was asked to propose a complete overhaul, meant to unite the world in sweeping away all traditional measures, based first on the period of the swing of a pendulum.
That didn’t fly, but the Assembly did eventually settle on a decimal system – very much in vogue as they also implemented a new calendar with new months, weeks of 10 days of 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds, for real – defining a “meter” (from the Greek for “measure”) as 1/10,000,000th of the meridian distance through Paris from the North Pole to the Equator, perhaps because that was roughly half the size of the existing medieval toise, the span of a man’s 2 arms. A standard iron toise was embedded in the wall of the Grand Chatelet by the 14th century and the refined Toise of Peru – really – was made official in 1766.
Louis XVI, still alive and sort of reigning, though in prison, approves this plan in June of 1791, his last free official act, the day before his ill-fated attempt to flee the country with Marie-Antoinette. Many twists and turns follow, first among which is how in the heck do you determine that meridional distance? Answer: send out 2 surveyors in 1792 with a complex plan to measure from Dunkirk to Barcelona, starting in Paris and headed in opposite directions. Which was a breeze, except for the imprisonments, the technical problems, the mountains, the political upheaval, the accidents and near-fatal injuries, the battlefronts, and the fact that one of them made meticulous and scrupulous notes and measurements and the other one didn’t, which meant that errors were baked into his numbers from the word go and he knew it but didn’t know how or why and didn’t want to admit it until his wife came along to help sort it out, kind of. Oops.
1793, the Terror grips Paris; Louis is executed in January, many scientists and thinkers follow for being insufficiently “revolutionary”. Bread riots break out in April of 1795 and within the week, the Convention formally adopts and mandates the metric system in the law of 18 Germinal, year III, with a motto no less: “For all times. For all peoples.” Very noble – though they acted not so much out of a sense of rationality, order and universality as desperately trying to control hyperinflation and save their own skins. Which didn’t work – they were overrun by new food riots within the month, but the deed was done. Bear in mind – the survey was still going on, and would continue for another 3 years, so they made a guess with a provisional version which got plonked on the wall we found.
Many more complications later, they finally defined something official based on the survey (which used 2-toise measuring sticks, by the way), in the form of a bar of pure platinum, which was forged by a formal royal goldsmith coaxed back from hiding to be the standard and placed in the National Archives – hence the name – in 1799, mimicking that familiar centuries-old physical toise standard. It’s 25mm wide and 4 mm deep and is – or was - exactly 1 meter in length, by definition, meaning that, that particular thing, was “the meter” and everything else needed to be gauged to that object, not because it meant or represented anything inherently, but because it was made for that purpose; it’s the idea of the thing and the actuality of the thing itself that establishes what the “standard” is.
It’s not, any more, partially because physical objects change no matter how carefully they’re kept, and finally fixing the errors in the original calculations required adding .2mm to the definition, approved in 1872 by the International Metre Commission, in Paris of course, and further meetings of almost entirely Western national representatives led to the Treaty of the Metre in 1875 (Paris again) and the establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, guardians of the system to this very day. New prototypes were fabricated in 1889; the US got number 27 in a lottery, and that was the official American standard until 1960, now sitting in a museum at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.
All fixed, yes? No. “The people” did not embrace this wonder of rationality for the reasons people don’t like change – these newfangled things are unfamiliar, we don’t understand it, why are we doing this, and it takes work, many other processes and functions have to change too. They didn’t like the new measures or the new names. So the meter gets new-old names to make adoption easier in 1800, which failed, even Napoleon gave up on them in 1809, permitting the use of older and more familiar measures; Louis XVIII bans the metric units outright in 1816, Louis-Phillippe reverses that in 1837 and in 1840, finally, finally, the meter is the meter, whatever it is. Except – it isn’t; it’s since been re-re-defined, in terms of the wavelength of krypton-86, and now, now – at time of recording - 1/299,792,458th of the distance traveled by light in a vacuum. A clumsy, decidedly unlovable definition, still for all times, for all people as the motto remains, even though removed from all human experience or reference.
Now, they tell us, it’s all settled, one nice tidy package, the Système international, integrated, seamless, you’re welcome, the metre and its cousins the second, the kilogram, the ampere, the kelvin, and mole and candela, and so many of our processes, devices, and lives are bound up by increasingly precise measurement that it’s hard to imagine any dramatic revolutionary – heh – overhaul, and yet the drive for precision goes on, no matter how minuscule or seemingly meaningless the refinement may seen.
The meter as we have it is the result of untold mistakes, errors, political intrusions and intrigues, and misadventures, which matter, but really don’t because no matter how you get there, there you are – the meter is the meter because everybody says, so and more or less agrees and it looks more or less like half of a centuries-old French rod and that is that.
Creating and articulating a standard, of anything, is relatively easy; communicating it is harder, and getting people to agree, and use it, and give up the old ways, is harder still, which is Americans have 2 liter soda bottles and grams of sodium on nutritional labels and used to have 35mm photographic film and that’s about it, although, even our old ones have succumbed; the yard for instance is now officially 0.9144m. So it goes.
The metric system was meant to be divorced from any particular culture and based solely on rationality and Nature, capital N. But you can’t remove the meter, or any measure, from its social and historical context, and the only way for a measure to be universal is if you do or at least pretend to. The meter is what it is because it emerged from Revolutionary France; if some other system had been invented, adopted, promulgated somewhere, somewhen else – it’d be different, but the net effect would be effectively nothing, because the standard is the standard…more or less.
Alder, Ken. The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World. New York: Free Press, 2002.
———. The Measure of the World. Dibner Library Lecture. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2003.
Atlas Obscura. “The Last Original Standard Metre.” Accessed July 4, 2024. http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-last-original-standard-metre.
BIPM. “Metre.” Accessed July 4, 2024. https://www.bipm.org/en/history-si/metre.
BIPM. “Welcome.” Accessed July 4, 2024. https://www.bipm.org/en/.
“History of the Metre.” In Wikipedia, May 15, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_metre&oldid=1223990942.
“How France Created the Metric System.” Accessed July 4, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180923-how-france-created-the-metric-system.
“International System of Units.” In Wikipedia, June 30, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_System_of_Units&oldid=1231739470.
McDonald, Daniel McLean. The Origins of Metrology: Collected Papers of Dr. Daniel McLean McDonald. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1992.
———. The Origins of Metrology: Collected Papers of Dr. Daniel McLean McDonald. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1992.
“Meter.” NIST, May 9, 2019. https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/meter.
Williams, Jeffrey H. Defining and Measuring Nature: The Make of All Things. IOP Concise Physics. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2014.
Winchester, Simon. “Galileo, Krypton, and How the True and Accurate Meter Came to Be.” Wired. Accessed July 4, 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-the-perfectionists-history-meter/.
World in the Balance : The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement - University of Washington. Accessed July 4, 2024. https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma99123279030001452&context=L&vid=01ALLIANCE_UW:UW&lang=en&search_scope=UW_EVERYTHING&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=UW_default&query=any,contains,world%20in%20the%20balance%20crease&offset=0.
Emily Post's name became synonymous with etiquette for most of the 20th century after the release of her definitive guide to good manners.
Oh dear, which fork am I supposed to use? It seems have forever been concocting rules about what to do and not to do in social situations, and thinking badly of others for breaking or not knowing those rules which aren’t written down but everybody else seems to know, and which are either engraved in stone or change by the day, and often wind up becoming exclusive: if you know, you’re in and if you don’t, you’re not. So many forks.
If only we had some sort of guide, a gracious hand gently chaperoning us through the minefield of social customs and mores, leavened with common sense, egalitarianism, and just a soupçon of dry wit, helping us all to be at our best and at our ease in any situation, better company, and better versions of ourselves and our societies.
A document that changed the world: “Etiquette in Society, in Business, and at Home”, written by Mrs. Emily Post, 1922.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and when you think of “etiquette” – the word comes directly from the French for “ticket” – you likely think of other words like “manners” or “decorum” or “civility” (living in a city), a code of appropriate, proper, correct, polite behavior and deportment, the “right way” to do things; in short, the rules. It might also bring to mind situations where you felt awkward or out of place, uncertain or unaware of what to do and afraid of making a mistake; in short, a clod. And forks, somehow forks always come up.
As ever, guides to such things go way back: Confucius wrote about social relationships, Renaissance books of courtesies (how to behave at a royal court), even a 3rd millennium BCE Egyptian work stressing the importance of virtues like kindness, truthfulness, not speaking down to others, and laugh at the boss’ jokes, really. Table manners come up in Eccleasticus, don’t wolf your food and don’t reach for anything first. Manners and behavior have been studied from sociological, anthropological, hygienic and even evolutionary perspectives, and consider for just a moment the various situations and places where a particular kind of etiquette can be involved: going to a movie or concert or religious service, while driving or walking, at work, even on an escalator, or in sports; winning a point in tennis with a ball that hits the net cord and bounces funny should prompt a brief wave/fauxpology, which nobody believes but if you don’t do it people get tetchy. And for those of you who’ve not experienced a men’s restroom, if there’s only one person in there and you take the urinal next to them, it’s weird.
So, it’s everywhere; lucky we are then to have had a guide, in the personage of Emily Post, whose name became synonymous with etiquette for most of the 20th century as the phrase “according to Emily Post” took hold. She had exactly the kind of upbringing you would expect from an etiquette maven. Born in Baltimore likely in October of 1872, to an architect who designed luxury communities and the daughter of a coal baron, educated first at home and then at Miss Graham’s finishing school; married at 20 to a stockbroker she met on the night of her debut in society, living in Washington Square with a country home. Idyllic. Until, that is, she dumped and divorced him in 1905 because he was being blackmailed for affairs with chorus girls. These things happen in the best of families.
She took to writing once her sons went off to boarding schools; newspaper and magazine articles, a few novels and a travel book about a road trip to San Francisco. Over her lifetime, the story of how she came to write The Book of Etiquette grew grander, that she had to have her arm twisted by the editor of Vanity Fair repeatedly after he casually suggested it at a dinner party; she said she thought the topic was boring and beneath her. That’s a great story, though not entirely true as we know from a letter to her literary agent 9 years earlier asking him to get her a gig writing a column on the subject, which she got.
A little context is important here; this dinner party takes place in early 1920: World War I and the flu pandemic have just ended, Prohibition has just started, women are on the cusp of earning hard-fought voting rights, and many groups of people are searching for the right ways to find their way in the world: recent immigrants, returned soldiers and their wives looking to further their careers and family situations, and the nouveaux riches who wanted to look a little less nouveaux. The then-current standby book is a fusty and musty two-volume tome that presupposed wealth and status and was filled with lots of piddly rules and details, and books of etiquette had been pouring out and very popular for decades. Writing something new and fresh would be a public service, Emily, how about it?
Though her sons tried to talk her out of it, she did. Writing in longhand at her father’s drafting table, she drew on examples and experiences from her own life, reaching out to friends and even strangers for their perspectives, working every day except Sundays, organizing and categorizing, and eventually delivering a quarter-million word manuscript in early 1922, yielding a 627 page book, bound in royal blue, and selling for a rather grand $4 (upwards of $50 today); word of mouth cut through the glut of competitors and it sold far beyond the publisher’s modest first print run of 5,000 copies, getting to 50,000 and a second printing within 6 months, along with syndication rights. By the time she died in 1960 it had gone through 89 printings in 10 revised editions.
In form, it’s often described as a “manual” which is sorta right – that connotes a kind of reference with rules, or instructions like for a car or appliance, not necessarily meant to be read straight through. There are “rules” here, though not laid out as for a sport or game, these are the kind that are enforced by withering stares or whispers leading to social ruin, literally “unspoken” but nonetheless expected to be known.
Emily throws open the French doors and lets everybody in on the secrets, and for my money, her book was a hit resulting from two sources of genius: she made it accessible and she made it fun. Her fiction background came in handy, as the book is populated with a wide cast of characters from the snooty Gildings to the understanding Kindharts, grandiose Mrs. Worldly and the Richan Vulgars, among others. The juicy dedication adds a little guessing-game fun too: “To you my friends whose identity in these pages is veiled in fictional disguise it is but fitting that I dedicate this book”.
There’s tons of advice and warnings and guidance and whatnot on dozens of matters many familiar today: introductions, social occasions and invitations, weddings, funerals, writing letters, as well as the arcana of debutante balls, paying calls, chaperons, afternoon teas and summer homes. However, a lot of it boils down to a couple of simple basics: Make the other person comfortable, put them at their ease. She had no patience for put-on airs, rudeness, pretention, and what she termed “the omniscience of the very rich”.
One of her central concepts was “Best Society” which sounds very la-di-da but she casts it egalitarian tones: “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which… charm of manner… and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members”
Ever seeking broader audiences – her daughter-in-law once remarked she always sought to be the center of attention – Emily became a radio star, appearing on multiple programs and networks several times a week throughout the 1930’s. Pearl Harbor knocked Emily and many others off the radio, understandably, though her column continued to thrive with 5 million readers and she produced a “War-Time Supplement” for a 1942 edition, highlighting necessary and sensible changes to conventions and behavior, reinforcing that “etiquette is not a fixed subject”: approving of women writing anonymous letters to soldiers, managing rushed weddings and honeymoons, hospitality without waste with smaller portions at mealtime, and carrying your own saccharin with you in time of sugar rationing.
More poignantly, don’t pepper returning veterans with questions about the war, getting a job, being home – let them raise the topics themselves when they’re ready. And in a special section on espionage, she warns against unfounded or hasty suspicions or accusations of foreigners, advice that sadly fell on too many deaf ears. A later postwar revision urges consideration for disabled veterans in a section called, typically frankly, “How to Treat Them”: “What are we going to do and say when they leave the hospitals and take their places in the world for which they have given so much?…don’t stare, don’t point, don’t make personal remarks”. It all worked, thousands of copies sold weekly during and after the war, and it was one of the most requested books for USO clubs.
Life magazine twice named her one of the most important Americans of the 20th century, another put her second to Eleanor Roosevelt as most the powerful woman in America in 1950, she was on a postage stamp in 1998, heck, she was in a Jeopardy! clue last night, and though I have to officially frown on this, Etiquette was reportedly second only to the Bible as the most stolen book from public libraries.
Etiquette is, a century on, in its 19th edition, now overseen by two of her great-great-grandchildren, and the Emily Post Institute continues her tradition of adapting and translating for the times, dispensing wisdom on unfriending, how to celebrate major Jewish and Islamic holidays, online gaming (trash talking is ok in the spirit of fun), “please” and “thank you” in sign language, social social distancing, and, God help us, Zoom meetings. Their podcast “Awesome Etiquette” is worth a listen.
We must now return to the most pressing matter: forks. Emily’s New York Times obituary has you covered: “If you picked up the wrong fork, there was a possibility that your hostess was wrong in having too many forks.” Ever gracious, ever trying to put everyone at their ease, she would have loved that.
The ancient text is a repertoire of about 200 spells meant to assist the newly departed soul in its perilous travels to get to an afterlife of comfort and plenty.
Can we please just stop and ask for directions? I know, it’s a cliché, and less relevant in our modern world with sophisticated GPS, digital mapping tools and apps, and so on, but it wasn’t so long ago that road maps and atlases and helpful gas station attendants were vital parts of making your way in new or unfamiliar territory. And guides of all sorts, from books to websites to word of mouth on social media, can also help to clue travelers in to local customs and lingo.
There’s one journey, though, that everybody takes sooner or later, but nobody comes back to tell us how it’s going; the ultimate journey, to “[t]he undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns” as Hamlet has it. The desire to know, and be ready for, what awaits us there, and moreover how to get there safely, has occupied a great deal of human thought and also yielded a work of exacting detail, surprising flexibility, and just the right word at just the right time.
A document that changed the world: “The Book of Going Forth by Day”, known more commonly today as “The Book of the Dead”, a set of spells and images from Egyptian funerary equipment, by about 1600 BCE.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School. The Book of the Dead was having something of a cultural moment in the late ‘70s when I was growing up, occupying much the same territory as horoscopes, crystals, amulets, tarot cards, auras, seances and the like. I think it’s the name, which you gotta admit is really cool, even if it’s made-up 19th century German. The culture, religion and mystique of ancient Egypt has fascinated for millennia from the Romans to today with TV shows still trying to figure out who or what killed King Tut, umpteen mummy movies back to 1899, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra (may Isis forgive us), “Walk Like an Egyptian” and even the staggeringly awful Gods of Egypt movie. There’s something compelling, dare we say spellbinding, about their civilization, art, and mythology. Think about it – why is the Washington Monument an obelisk of all things?
What we now know as the “Book of the Dead” is many things, but it’s not a book in any contemporary sense of the word. It’s better described as a corpus, a repertoire of about 200 spells meant to assist the newly departed soul in its perilous travels to get to an afterlife of comfort and plenty. It’s part of a genre called “mortuary literature” and has its origins in earlier forms, starting with Pyramid Texts as far back as 2300 BCE actually written on the walls of royal pyramids, sometimes with intentionally mutilated characters to prevent harm; these evolved into Coffin Texts, so named because they were written on the insides of coffins.
Around 1700 BCE, sarcophagi changed from rectangular to more human shapes, which might have left less room for interior writing, and that might have led to the adoption of papyrus, a writing material already in use for over a millennium, yielding the plentiful examples we now know of. Over time, these too evolved, from the hieroglyphic writing we associate with Ancient Egypt to the more readable hieratic script and the increasing addition of images which were equally potent in achieving the desired effects. These papyri survived in large part because the dry desert climate helped to preserve them, though there are examples stained with, um, fluids from the mummified remains they were buried with, often placed in direct contact with the bodies, presumably for easy access.
The Egyptians believed that the only way to Duat, the underworld, was through the tomb, and that rituals both in life and in death were necessary to get there. The newly-deceased would have to make a perilous journey, passing through a series of gateways or portals guarded by fearsome beasts, demons, and gods, and facing a number of challenges and questions along the way, requiring precise and correct answers at each stage, which the spells were meant to provide, so having them at the ready was critical in making it through successfully. Spells could protect you against dangerous animals, allow you to breathe or drink, or transform your physical form as necessary, reflecting their belief in magic, the power of both the written and spoken word.
After employing dozens of these preparatory and protective spells, providing detailed intel on the specific names of gates and their guardians, the deceased would arrive for the Declaration of Innocence at the Hall of Two Truths, facing a panel of 42 judges presided over by Osiris, god of the underworld. Here Spell 125 would have you covered, so you could correctly name each of the assessors and perform the Negative Confession, swearing your innocence to a long list of possible sins and crimes, including murder, blasphemy, cruelty, profiteering, adultery, impatience, tampering with weights or slaying sacred cattle. At this point, your heart, which they saw as the essence of a person and the seat of mind and intellect, which would remember what you did in life, would be weighed against a feather representing truth; one of the most-discussed spells, number 30, directs the heart not to rat you out, literally not to make your name stink, which could come in quite handy indeed for many of us. Failure at any stage meant an eternity of isolation, dishonor and degradation, including the eating of excrement (ewww), perpetual thirst, or being thrown into a lake of fire or devoured by wild beasts. Passing the test on the other hand led to paradise, a bountiful and successful afterlife, filled with eating, drinking, sex – and work, though burial figures known as ushabti would handily come to life to do that for you.
Now, here’s the thing that gets me. This has got to be the highest stakes journey you could imagine, one wrong move or word and it’s the dunghill for dinner forever. And there’s lots of redundancy in the system, in addition to spells on the walls and insides of sarcophagi, there are examples on leather, stelae, even on the mummifying linen bandages themselves so the deceased would literally be wrapped in the spells; others are intended to be inscribed on scarabs or magical bricks. But – and this is a pretty monumental but – of all the many examples which have been studied, no two appear to be identical.
There is, apparently, no canonical or definitive version; each person – and let’s be clear that this is an elite and exclusive practice reserved for people who could afford it all, maybe 10% of the population at best – got to pick their own from an evolving corpus of options and possibilities. There are commonalities and patterns, to be sure, but there is great variation in content and length, ranging from scraps with a handful of spells to scrolls up to 40m in length. The choices of which spells to include and in what order appear to be purposeful and carefully considered, rather than merely random, though it’s unclear by which criteria these decisions were made, economic perhaps, or personal preference? I have to say, for something this important in a culture so fixated on a successful afterlife as well as the peace of mind of the living, it’s astonishing that some of these practices seem idiosyncratic and apparently that was not only ok, but more or less the norm.
Scrolls were probably created in temple scriptoria by teams of professionals, some of whom focused on images, others on text, not entirely unlike some modern comic books or graphic novels; scholars estimate a good quality version could be produced in a week or two, though the quicker option for your dearly beloved on the go is a more or less off-the-rack version, with spaces left for names to be written in, including some instances where the characters needed to be stretched out or squeezed in to fit and even some with the names still blank which might have caused some red faces in front of Osiris. A “decorated” one might cost you the equivalent of a half year of a workman’s wage, or the price of 3 donkeys.
A typical scroll often has a blank papyrus sheaf attached to the outside for protection, is 20-40cm wide, and highly structured, primarily using black ink, with red for headings, openings, and names of dangerous animals; there are regular margins, framing lines, and fields for images which were increasingly prevalent over the centuries, so we know that great care was taken with these though little evidence of practice or training versions has been uncovered, and master copies are quite rare. The practice continued through several periods and dynasties, eventually starting to fade out by the turn of the Common Era as the Greeks and Romans entered the scene.
We owe that super cool name to Karl Richard Lepsius, described as the founder of German Egyptology, who apparently named it “Tötenbuch”, perhaps from the Arabic term used by villagers to describe tomb papyri. I won’t attempt the name by which the Egyptians knew it, translating roughly into “The Book of Going Forth by Day,” reinforcing that the soul isn’t trapped in the tomb, can move, and go into the daylight as they so fervently hoped. Lepsius published the first translation with the still-used numbering system in 1842, followed by comparative edition by the Swiss scholar Edouard Naville, who crafted a more or less “complete” version of each of the many dozens of spells, with variations. This work took nearly 10 years, supplemented by vignettes drawn by his wife Marguerite [Naville]. At first, spells would have been drawn or transcribed for publication by hand, using tracing paper; then a metal movable type set was created. Now, as you’d expect, there are digital fonts, and hieroglyphic characters have their own Unicode points, created in 2009, nestling right between Cypro-Minoan cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphs. Research continues; the most recent complete version, the first in a century, was found in 2022 at the Saqqara necropolis near Cairo.
It is possible – that they had it right, and those who survived the beasts and labryinths and judgment are enjoying the fruits of the bountiful and eternal afterlife they anticipated. We tend to think of ancient Egypt as unchanging, stable, as rigid as the poses in their paintings and as monolithic as the pyramids and obelisks, and, let’s be fair, the pharaonic period endured more than 10 times as long as the United States has. Yet not only did this practice evolve over a couple of millennia, they were remarkably flexible about the specific form.
Many writers compare the Book to a travel guide, which is fine, though I would also suggest it’s an odd hybrid – not unlike a crocodile-headed god, with a password manager or better still those little post-it notes you’re not supposed to have next to your computer that remind you of what codes you need to access what, equally valuable in navigating the traps and pitfalls of the modern world.
When your time comes, I might suggest you could do worse than start with Spell 9: “I have opened up every path which is in the sky and on earth, for I am the well-beloved son of my father Osiris. I am noble, I am a spirit, I am equipped; O all you gods and all you spirits, prepare a path for me.”
When all is said and done in the convoluted process of American presidential elections, hundreds speak for the tens of millions who vote — and in the end it’s a set of documents that speak for us all, for the record.
Everybody’s heard the saying “one person, one vote,” right? Deep down we all know better, far from it, through various notions of who qualifies as a "person” and who gets to vote and yet still we say it. Elections are the mechanism by which those persons — people — have their say, and, ultimately, speak. When all is said and done in the convoluted process of American presidential elections, hundreds speak for the tens of millions who vote — and in the end it’s a set of documents that speak for us all, for the record.
A document that changed the world: the set of materials produced in support of the work of the 59th Electoral College vote, 2020.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and if you’re looking to go into the deepest, darkest, nerdiest electoral weeds, you’ve come to the right place. Our focus here is exclusively on the mechanics and the materials that make it all work. I lived in New York state for my first election and remember being sternly advised that if I wanted to write in a presidential candidate, I would have to actually write in the names of all the electors for that candidate, and even though I really hadn’t been thinking about it that would’ve put me right off. We all probably know by now that there are only a few hundred people who get to directly vote for president and vice president of the United States, the electors who the rest of us vote for, knowingly or otherwise, who gather to cast their votes typically in state capitals a few weeks later.
Those sessions, when the electors put pen to paper and perform the true act of voting for president and vice president, are meant to be ceremonial, proscribed, almost ritualistic, but all those steps and all those documents play important roles. So yes, there’s all the rigmarole and signing of very stiff looking pieces of paper — and I’m here to tell you, well then what happens, after the ceremonies, or for that matter before, what makes it work? What do those papers say? Into the weeds we go.
We’ve all grown accustomed to watching the election night returns like they were sporting events, where the score is always displayed on the TV screen and we wait for Al Michaels or Mary Carrillo to tell us the final score when the game is over. (Fun fact, sports require final reports too.) We all see the numbers pile up but the networks don’t get to decide or declare who wins, no matter how obvious it might be. The steps that follow and the papers that record those steps make it real, legal, permanent, in one of the most basic functions of a document: to document.
A great deal of what happens is spelled out in multiple provisions of the Constitution, starting with Article II, Section 1, later revised in ways small and large by no fewer than 10 subsequent amendments ranging from the 12th in 1804 creating separated votes for president and vice president, through a number of suffrage expansions by race, “servitude,” sex and age; additional details for filling vacancies; term limits; granting electoral votes to the District of Columbia, abolition of poll taxes; and the quite rococo processes of the 25th Amendment around vacancies and the disability of the president. No aspect of the Constitution has been amended more times than by which the office of the presidency is assumed. Furthermore, U.S. Code Title 3, Chapter 1 fleshes out more specifics, with precursor legislation that goes back to 1887, based largely on the still disputed electoral debacle of 1876.
While most people know the electoral college exists and more or less what it does, far fewer likely know critical roles played by the National Archives. As the keeper of the nation’s official records, the Archives facilitates coordination with all the states and the Congress. They produce and publish a handy guide for state officials, including a checklist of about two dozen steps from identifying a contact person for ongoing communication to keeping the tracking number when the appropriate certificates are sent out.
Each state is responsible for running its elections in its own way, subject to provisions of the Constitution and federal law. Two sets of documents are required for presidential election, following state certification of the final results. The first are Certificates of Ascertainment, in which the governor lists the names of the electors chosen by the voters and the number of votes each of them has received. These must be hand signed by the governor and bear the state seal. Nine of the certificates are prepared, three sent as soon as possible to the Archives and six waiting for the actual vote of the electors.
Which is where the second set of documents come in, the Certificates of Vote. When the electors meet, they must each cast individual signed separate ballots for president and vice president. The votes are tallied — typically a matter of no great suspense, though the issue of “faithless electors,” who go rogue and vote for somebody other than the winner of the state popular vote, has become sufficiently bothersome that a majority of states now have some law fining or disqualifying faithless electors. Once that’s all settled, each elector signs six Certificates of Vote listing all persons who received electoral votes for both offices and the number of votes.
There are no federal standards for how these certificates should look, though they may not include names of any people who did not receive votes and must all be signed by all electors. This leads to a quite charming range of examples from the deeply elaborate with lots of exotic gothic fonts and border frippery to straightforward and frankly disappointing word-processed documents that might just as easily be recording next year’s Rotary president. They also feature closing phrases like “In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the State of Washington to be affixed” or some such exorbitant language; these are called “eschatochols,” descendants of medieval charters and are much the same as any notary public would use. Plain or fancy, they do the job.
These are paired with the remaining Certificates of Ascertainment, sealed up and distributed: two to the Archivist of the United States, two to the Secretary of State of the state, one to the chief judge of the Federal District Court where the electors have met, and the one that really matters, to the President of the Senate (the sitting vice president), by registered mail no less. If those certificates don’t get to the President of the Senate or the Archivist within about nine days they are then directed by law to request the relevant state’s Secretary of State to immediately send their copies and moreover to send a “special messenger” to the local federal district judge to fetch the ones they have by “the most expeditious method available,” and if that messenger neglects their duty there’s a $1,000 fine. Whew.
Presuming that all works out, there is then a joint session of Congress where the President of the Senate opens all the sealed certificates, in alphabetical order, reads them out and tellers — usually chairs and ranking members of Senate and House administrations committees — tally the final votes. This process is often expedited, with the envelopes being opened and passed in short order dispensing with a reading of the formal language. In 1997, this all took 24 minutes; in 2013, 23 minutes; in 2017, 41 minutes.
Federal law spells out several provisions regarding the Congressional session and disposition of any potential objections to one or more states’ votes. Nominally this could be as a result of questions of authenticity of the documents themselves including the possibility of multiple certificates from the same state, either by two different state authorities making different determinations, no determination by any state authority, or the receipt of some extraneous certificate not from the recognized system laid out in that state’s law. In practice this process, requiring objection from at least one member from each house, has been invoked only twice since the original 1887 federal law was enacted, in both cases by Democrats; in 1969, when an elector from North Carolina faithlessly but legally voted for George Wallace rather than Richard Nixon; and in 2005, when objections were made to voting irregularities in Ohio. In each case, the individual houses debated per the law and rejected the objections.
The 1961 counting of the 1960 election, decided by a razor thin popular vote majority but a substantial electoral majority, provided the spectacle of then VP Nixon presiding over the count of the election he lost to John Kennedy. In a gruesome twist of fate, Hawaii, voting in its first presidential election, was sufficiently close that two sets of electoral votes were submitted to meet the deadlines; the final count after Christmas showed Kennedy winning by 115 votes, and Nixon unilaterally suggested ruling in favor of the Democratic slate of electors, “so as not to delay the count,” which was agreed to by unanimous consent. That must have stung.
This is one of the simplest, if not necessarily the most straightforward, of document stories, or at least it should be and yet in times of stress or doubt or confusion, even or perhaps especially in a digital, streaming, cloud-based world, these pieces of paper, documents are there to provide clarity. All the steps and signatures and seals and rules and laws and forms and ceremonies confer heft, seriousness, reality, officialness to the documents and to the process and results. Those other five official backup copies are only required to be maintained for a year, though I suspect mostly they’re kept forever as an enduring record of one of the most pivotal decisions a democracy can make.
One often hears that “the system” has worked: the political system, the electoral system, the legal system, whatever. True, but — those systems don’t, won’t, can’t work without information systems and more specifically documents and information objects to reinforce and bolster the processes and procedures. Otherwise, it’s all just talk, no matter how many other people try to have their say.
Sources:
“Arizona Group’s Fake Electors Try to Cast 11 Electoral Votes for Trump.” Accessed January 3, 2021.
National Archives. “For State Officials,” November 14, 2019.
National Archives. “Instructions and Guidance for State Officials and Points of Contact,” July 27, 2020.
National Archives. “Key Dates and Events for State Officials and Points of Contact,” July 27, 2020.
Neale, Thomas. “The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline.” Congressional Research Service, October 22, 2020.
Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. “The 2020 Presidential Election: Provisions of the Constitution and U.S. Code.” National Archives and Records Administration, July 2020.
Rybicki, Elizabeth. “Counting Electoral Votes: An Overview of Procedures at the Joint Session, Including Objections by Members of Congress.” Congressional Research Service, December 8, 2020.
Shoenberger, Elisa. “What Do Archivists Have to Do with the Presidential Election?” Library Journal. Accessed January 3, 2021.
“The Electoral College.” Accessed January 3, 2021.
“United States Electoral College.” In Wikipedia, December 31, 2020.
“U.S.C. Title 3 - THE PRESIDENT.” Accessed January 3, 2021.
A time capsule, buried on the site of the New York World’s Fair by the Westinghouse Corporation in 1938, to be opened in 5,000 years, is a snapshot in time and a document that changed the world.
Let’s get metaphysical for a moment, shall we? All physical objects are space-time phenomena; they occupy space and have a finite lifespan, big and small, long and short, from the Great Pyramid and the negative handprints in the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia to last week’s grocery list I already recycled.
All objects can also be “documents,” often unintentionally. My grocery list is of minimal interest to me after I get home, of even less interest to you, but 100 years from now, it might provide insight into 21st century shopping practices, eating habits, domestic life or my fondness for dark chocolate. Mostly these objects’ lifespans take their own courses, but in some cases they can be prolonged by accident or design, including being put away and hopefully preserved, potentially to better and more purposefully inform an unimaginably distant future.
A document that changed the world: a time capsule, buried on the site of the New York World’s Fair by the Westinghouse Corporation, to be opened in 5,000 years, 1938.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I acknowledge this episode is slightly premature; any “world changing” to be done here is mostly about 4,900 years in the future, so I’m taking my opportunity now. Let’s also acknowledge that “time capsule” – a phrase originally coined for this project – is a misnomer. It’s no more possible to encapsulate time than it is light or heat or life, it flows as it does and the best we can hope for is to overcome or compensate for its effects. Which doesn’t stop people from being fascinated by the prospect, as we are with time itself. By my count, the OED entry for “time” describes 40 primary and secondary senses of the word and over 350 phrases from “about time” to “with time.”
Objects survive in all kinds of ways; accidentally left in walls, attics, unused spaces, as well as unintended circumstances: think Pompeii, Chernobyl, the Titanic. They also survive in straightforward ways, collected and preserved in cultural heritage repositories like museums, archives and libraries, so they can be used, displayed, or studied.
Putting together a bunch of stuff and sticking it away, hidden from view, is another matter. That’s intentional too but now those objects are being re-characterized as exemplars of their time or society, meant to affect how a future world should remember, perceive and understand us.
Naturally, people argue over the earliest examples, apart from the ancient practices of sanctifying buildings by installing objects in foundations; a box placed in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House in 1795 by Samuel Adams, unearthed and added to in 1855 and reopened in 2015 contained a plaque and coins going back to 1652, though there was no specific time nor retrieval strategy in mind. The Philadelphia Exhibition celebrated the American centennial in 1876 with a “Century Safe,” which was opened on schedule for the bicentennial, and that commemorative example continued in various cities after ever since.
Activity seemed to pick up in the 1930s. The Crypt of Civilization – quite grand if also morbid – is based at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, when their president mused, while researching ancient history, that preserving contemporary objects would be of great value to future historians. At least in those days, university presidential whims were indulged, and the Crypt, a 20x20x10 former swimming pool underneath Pheobe Hearst Hall, came to fruition in 1940, and now the inevitable International Time Capsule Society is headquartered there as well.
The one, however, that stands out among the rest, was buried in the way such things are, with great fanfare and ceremony and the tolling of a Chinese gong – borrowed from Chinatown for the purpose – in front of what would be the Westinghouse Building of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, themed the World of Tomorrow, at high noon, the exact moment, give or take a minute, of the autumnal equinox, on September 23, 1938, on the day the New York Times front page bore the headline “Chamberlain Meets Hitler; Talks to Continue Today; New Government in Prague.” Within the week, he will head home waving the Munich Declaration, proclaim “peace in our time,” Germany will march into the Sudetenland and the world will be plunged into yet another world war.
The Times provided a predictably serious and respectful piece on the burial, while the Washington Post had a bit more fun in the runup, referring to the capsule as a “Tut-Like Tomb,” suggesting inclusions such as a horse racing program, a picture of a drug store window, an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, or a hamburger. They might have been on to something. We were also treated to a vignette of future archaeologists Owlf and Pipwir surveying and misunderstanding the contents, and another speculating on the likelihood that the 70th century might not care about or need the capsule, as they might be able to “dial the proper light wave” to find out everything they wanted to know about 1938. Hmmm.
But let’s stay in those last golden days of innocence. As part of a long-standing campaign to spruce up their public image, Westinghouse PR man G. Edward Pendray while on vacation dreamt up the idea of building and burying a “time bomb” (or maybe “vessel” or “container” or “can”) at the laying of the cornerstone of their Fair building, and viewing it through a periscope became one of the key attractions of the Fair. Ideas for miniature souvenir capsules to be sold to defray the $1,000 cost of the project somehow went nowhere, nor sadly the notion of marketing $30 versions to be buried with people in their caskets.
As with any such project, they then had certain fundamental questions to answer: what to put in, where to put it, how to keep it safe, and how to get it unput.
The contents are lovingly enumerated in a little booklet, which also describes the painstaking processes of developing the new copper alloy to protect the torpedo-shaped capsule, 7½ feet long and 8 3/8” in diameter, buried 50 feet deep in marshy soil, covered in pitch and concrete to deter 45th century tomb robbers who might want the slide rule or the can opener or the 1937 Yearbook of Dentistry. It further extols all the technological wizardry of Pyrex and wax and nitrogen and whatnot to keep the contents intact. The Time Capsule Committee assembled several dozen items of common use, samples of industrial materials, some certificates, and an extensive microfilm library and newsreels necessitating instructions on how to build devices to view those, along with a quite elaborate and quite impenetrable “guide to the English language” which I can’t imagine will leave our descendants much the wiser about how we talk.
If they do, they’ll find some 10 million words: dictionaries, magazines, newspapers, lots of encyclopedia articles with a heavy emphasis on science and business, Gone With the Wind airline timetables, and the Sears Roebuck catalog. The only physical book is, inevitably, the Bible. I imagine some of the other objects will be of more interest: an alarm clock, nail file, telephone, toys (a car for boys and a doll for girls), a baseball, a toothbrush and tooth powder.
And a hat. Much is made, in multiple places including press coverage at the time, of the inclusion of a ladies’ hat specially designed for the capsule and stuffed with surgical cotton to protect its shape, placed at the top so it doesn’t get crushed. I hope to heaven that hat survives, because the only woman I can clearly identify as participating in any substantive way in this whole business is its designer, Lilly Daché.
The point of the exercise, though, is to get it retrieved, 5,000 years on, so clearly something more than circling a date on a calendar will suffice. Their solution was to create a Book of Record, specially printed using ultra high quality paper and ink and with specially designed type, hand sewn and all that; copies were distributed to “libraries, museums, monasteries, convents, lamaseries, temples and other safe repositories throughout the world.” Currently, about 300 of the 3,650 copies can be found in library collections, as well as in the Internet Archive, though my money’s on the print ones for durability. There’s several pages of intricate instructions, multiple dating systems, geopositioning information, planetary alignments and such to indicate the fated time and place and how to open it safely, which if they haven’t yet dug up the guide to understanding English one wonders how that will work but never mind – and besides, as they say, if it’s somehow forgotten, “we may depend on the perennial curiosity and the digging and burrowing habits of the human race, to unearth it sooner or later.” I feel better already.
Even though much of this is comical now, there’s a remarkably optimistic high-mindedness throughout you can’t help admiring, especially in the face of what they must surely have known was coming. Maybe? that explains it – in a world likely spinning out of control, there’s an appeal in the idea of sealing away a slice of today, in the hopes of getting through a bad tomorrow for a better day after tomorrow.
If you’re still undaunted, numerous guidelines and instructions, from professional associations, institutions, and companies selling do-it-yourself capsules, lay out the kinds of objects and materials to avoid – no food or plants understandably, rubber releases sulfur, wood gives off acid, textiles should be free of insects, electronics raise questions of power supply and the stability of media, and so on. One author has described these as a posed portrait in contrast to the candid picture that might otherwise from random objects’ survival. Decisions of what to include necessarily imply decisions of what not to include, and as ever who gets to make those decisions and how and why are an inextricable aspect of any such endeavor, saying at least as much about the society that produces a time capsule as do the contents.
Why put it away, in a container? Why bury it? (Hint: You shouldn’t.) Why not put these things out in the open for people to see and learn from every day? Well, sure, but where’s the fun in that? That’s a museum case or a diorama, those are a dime a dozen. A time capsule provides the thrill of concealment and mystery, the kind of birthday-present surprise which adds that little frisson of excitement to putting away a box for a generation or two and hoping for the best.
So what’s the end of the story? Well, like with any good time capsule, we don’t know and we won’t know for something like 1.8 million days and yes, it’s still there, under what is now Flushing Meadows Park, waiting. Just about any time capsule story hinges on one simple word: if. If it survives intact, if it’s remembered, if it’s found and successfully opened. Sadly, because this was buried a year early, they couldn’t include one of the signature keepsakes from the 1939 Fair, small pins from the General Motors Futurama exhibit of a utopian 1960 America that read, simply, “I have seen the future.” Time capsules are intended to go the other way around – so that if they work, the future can see us.
Where is the law, anyway? That’s a surprising question – more typically you might ask what the law is, or perhaps who says so, why it is how it is, how we might change it, but “where”?
Where is the law, anyway? That’s a surprising question – more typically you might ask what the law is, or perhaps who says so, why it is how it is, how we might change it, but “where”? I mean, Google it, or ask a lawyer, or go to a courthouse or library if necessary, but it’s got to be around here somewhere, right?
Even those of us with keen senses of direction can get turned around in complicated spaces, and they don’t come any more complicated than a major museum, to wit the Louvre. So when, after a brisk and toasty whirl through the major sights, our niece said she wanted to find one more thing – not included in our handy guidebook – off we went in search. And search. And search. Maps, guides, apps, other visitors, all were happy to help, though without much effect, so with regret we decided to abandon the hunt and make for the “nearest” exit, apparently some 10 km away. Naturally, when all hope was gone, voila: There it was. And so we ran smack into one of the seminal legal writings of all time, whose motivation and purpose are kinda murky and whose common name is probably misleading, and whose power and influence resonate more than 3 millennia later.
A document that changed the world: A basalt stela, engraved with what is today known as the Code of Hammurabi; now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, about 1754 BCE.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I’m dedicating this episode to Annie Price, who inspired it. When she wanted to find this, naturally I was up for it, expecting – I dunno, tablets of some kind? – having never really given it much thought. I was not expecting a 7+ foot high stela, free standing, tall and narrow, resembling let’s say, a finger, carved from top to bottom, in vertical lines – and not that many people around, compared to the hordes surrounding the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, who’ve had better press. It’s the longest known early Mesopotamian inscription, executed in cuneiform in the Akkadian language in a traditional, even archaic, format, likely calling back to times historic, though written in everyday language, perhaps so that it would be more readily understandable. It was displayed in its time in the city of Sippar, then captured in the 12th century BCE and moved to Susa, where it was rediscovered in 1901 by Gustave Jéquier, and moved to the Louvre, where it now resides in room 227.
I confess my prior knowledge of this was limited to hazy junior-high cradle-of-civilization, Tigris-and-Euphrates memories. Hammurabi’s reign lies smack in the middle of the 300-year First Dynasty of Babylon, and he was involved in the requisite kingly military campaigns, political offensives and conquests. There is much we don’t know about him, including how old he was when he ascended the throne in 1792 BCE, other than during his reign there was a move toward consolidation of city-states into larger political units. He ruled for over 40 years, and this artifact comes from near the end of that reign, at roughly the time of pottery use in Peru, the extinction of the woolly mammoths in Siberia, the end of pyramid building in Egypt, the development of chariots, the composite bow, and tables for solving quadratic equations.
The current common name is somewhat of a misnomer. We begin with a preface establishing the king’s authority and divine calling, “to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak…” Nice thought, still a ways to go there.
Then follows not so much a code of laws in the modern sense as a codification, or recording, of what are often referred to as “edicts,” mostly if/then statements, like No. 22: “If any one is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death.” Straightforward enough, though No. 21 is more intriguing: ‘If any one break a hole into a house, he shall be put to death before that hole and be buried.” This feels more specific, a response to an individual event, and there are lots of examples like this, lists of particular circumstances, not abstracted into higher principles, more like case law leading to speculation that these represent individual kingly judicial decisions, including some internal contradictions. (And by the way, who wants an unsuccessful robber buried in your back yard?)
What we have is incomplete, missing Nos. 66-99 of 282 edicts, with erasures likely dating from about 500 years after its creation, perhaps for new inscriptions that were never made. About half deal with contracts, and another chunk with what we would call family law – inheritance, divorce, paternity. Others deal with theft, debt, medical malpractice, even the establishment of a minimum wage. It’s best known, though, as a very early example of what is known as “lex talionis,” the law of retaliation or retribution: No. 195. If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off. No. 196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. No. 197. If he break another man's bone, his bone shall be broken.
If that rings kind of Old Testament, you’re not wrong, though there’s no direct evidence of a link from here to there. It’s worth noting that there are older collections of “laws” going back at least 300 years earlier, all of which share certain characteristics. Some practices have fallen out of favor more recently; judges then who failed to reach a decision could refer the matter to the gods in a trial by ordeal in the river. Hammurabi’s code is among the earliest, however, to incorporate a sense of the presumption of innocence of the accused, and the use of evidence in supporting a case.
Those sound familiar – sadly, so does this: No. 198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina. No. 199. If he put out the eye of a man's slave, or break the bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one-half of its value. Throughout the Code, punishments are explicitly differentiated by social status; the word “wardum” is often translated as “slave” though more likely connotes something between a debtor and an indentured servant – while we can’t precisely transpose their social classes to anything familiar, you get the idea. This class structure is overt and inescapable, as is differentiation by gender (men were permitted affairs with servants and slaves; unfaithful women were drowned in the Euphrates with their lovers). In general, crimes again the state are punished more harshly than those against individuals. I suppose there’s something to be said for this kind of bias to be explicit and overt. As with any society, insight into its legal systems and principles provides insight into broader social structures and norms, in ways later generations might find welcome or repellent.
Other records from the time also suggest a larger legal system of judges, processes, the use of written evidence and witnesses, and a substantial documentary infrastructure: The loser of a case had to give the winner a “tablet of non-complaining” confirming agreement with the decision, and that he won’t raise the issue again.
So – where is the law? It’s right here, in the middle of the town square carved into this giant stone thing, written down for everybody to see, because the king said so and the gods said he could say so. Any other questions?
Given the circumstances, likely not. We don’t, probably can’t, fully know what this was meant to do, or to represent; theories range from an early attempt to lay out something like a constitution to a naked PR move to reinforce royal authority, and it also served as a rhetorical example, copied by scribes, for about 1,000 years. It seems probable it was meant to make some version of “the law” public, written down, visible, literally carved in stone, rather than purely arbitrary or ambiguous, which can simultaneously extend and limit the power of a ruler who gets to make and publish the rules, but then once they’re out he has to abide by them, more or less. Those rules and laws then also reinforce and reify the structures and roles of the society, with a permanence that only basalt, notoriously difficult to edit, can provide.
“Finding the law” is both easier and harder now; search engines pull things up in an instant – though the systems of codifying and organizing legal writing, created to ensure thoroughness, completeness, and authenticity of statutes at multiple governmental levels, court opinions, legal treatises and more, can be complex, especially across jurisdictions and international boundaries. Other barriers can be raised, too; something like 20 US states copyright some part of their legal documentation; in a lawsuit against a public interest group that posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the state referred to the group’s “strategy of terrorism.” Even today, finding “the law” can be difficult, as finding justice still too often remains elusive as well.
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