"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 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, to see that it offered certain protections from mutilation, torture, and execution."
For millennia rulers bestowed rights and privileges, defining human value through social rank in Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Rulers' peers received dignitas while others occupied lower hierarchical positions. Hindu societies formalized divine kingship and caste hierarchies that restricted movement and enforced servitude for outcastes. Hammurabi's legal code allocated protections and punishments according to status, granting some protection from mutilation, torture, and execution while varying penalties by offender and victim rank. Archaeological evidence reveals that legal safeguards depended on social standing. Ancient sovereignties justified prerogatives by divine sanction. Plato equated human law with divine will extending aristocratic privileges. Aristotle proposed biological determinism to explain social inequalities.
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