3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Royal authority in Hammurabi’s Babylon depended on institutions it did not simply replace: lineages, temples, households, and privileged associations. In this completed section on the state, Richard Thurnwald reads laws alongside royal letters and contracts to ask how kingship cut across inherited dependencies while continuing to govern through them. His distinctive emphasis falls on overlapping functions: temples stored and lent as well as taught, while figures translated as merchants also collected dues and directed exchange. Legal distinctions between free people, royal dependents, and enslaved people make these relationships tangible through unequal compensation and punishment. Readers encounter a reconstruction of government through personal obligations rather than an impersonal apparatus—one whose tentative institutional identifications and evolutionary assumptions remain open to scrutiny.