I was playing Scrabble the other night with my wife. I never have been entirely comfortable with a game wherein she might score a tidy sum by adding an S to an existing word or by the strategic placement of the word zit, whilst I might play the word ytterbium and score far less.
Against all logic, one cannot resort to Polish when in possession of too many consonants. One must suffer a condition known as consonantipation. Nor can one make words in Hawaiian when holding a fistful of vowels and in dire need of a vowel movement. All because of the rules, you understand.
Three months out of Egypt, Moses brought his people the Ten Commandments. Hammurabi gave two hundred and eighty-two laws to his subjects at an earlier date. Before that, there was the Code of Ur-Nammu. That code was put in cuneiform during the Sumerian Renaissance over four thousand years ago and it had a mere fifty-seven rules.
Urukagina was codifying reforms to the existing rules in the town of Lagash at an even earlier date. He used the opportunity to take strong measures against usury, hunger, theft and murder after taking over the throne from Lugalanda, the son of a High Priest who was not at all popular.
After the dust settled, polyandry was made illegal. Widows and orphans were exempted from taxes. The city of Lagash now paid for the all the beer at funerals! Urukagina’s next initiative was to increase the population of the Royal Household of Elite Women from fifty to fifteen hundred. He gifted this reformed household with some real estate that he had confiscated from the former priest's son. He changed the sign over the door from Royal Household of Women to Household of The Goddess Bau and put the whole institution under the careful supervision of Shasha, his wife.
Many of his laws dealt with the interaction between slaves and elite people or between men and women. Rules. They are always for your own good and always dictated by someone with the power to crush you like a bug. Historically, most givers of rules have claimed to be merely the messengers of a deity or to have been appointed by one such.
During the aftermath of each of these law-bringing episodes, the working folks were often heard to say variations of these Three Most Ancient Phrases:
In such times was born the Akkadian phrase (often heard while quaffing free ales at Lagash funerals), “Now, where can you get that?”
And the Babylonian all-purpose chestnut, “Who knew?”
During Ur-Nammu's reign, the good people of Nippur and friends of Lugalanda asked, “What can you do?”
Rules have been written by the Finger of God on stone, quickly destroyed and subsequently rewritten. They have been dictated by the messengers of deities and later recorded by men. Rules have also been inscribed by clerks for self proclaimed mediums channelling deities or other such entities.
Over time, many sets of rules and codes of law have been accumulated by homo sapiens. Far too many to ever count comfortably. All written by mortal, mammalian men and women and imposed upon other mortal, mammalian men and women, who often need to be reminded of that fact. To complicate matters, Priests, Princes and Barons also demand fair play; while those who grow the food, haul the water and chop the wood, still utter the Three Ancient Phrases mentioned above.
The rules may variously be called a Code, a Codex, a Charter, a Manifesto, the Commandments, the Proclamations, the Regulations, the Statutes or the Law. They may be inscribed on clay tablets, etched on metal plates, chiselled in stone, written on sheepskin or on papyrus paper.
Between authoring, administering, enforcing, codifying, reforming, interpreting, announcing and amending the rules, Administrations become unusually large and unwieldy, generating a need more peons. If the unwitting, arm’s-length, slave-owning, debt slaves who form the strata of Society just below Elite, become disgruntled, they can always be tricked into accepting a worse set of rules by paid actors sent among them to lead them to their “own” conclusions.
All games have rules. We are to understand from game theories that it is the very constraints upon us that call forth our creative spirits in our endeavour to survive. The popular, top-down argument is that limits placed upon our actions, call forth greater ingenuity and give rise to more noble works. When we look back over time and see the actions of individuals who had no restraints placed upon them and, quite predictably, behaved badly, we must tend to agree.
This observation begs the logical question, "Why it is that the rules are made by such unrestrained, infantile individuals and then imposed upon those who are noble by necessity?
When I was a child, I abandoned basketball within moments of learning the ridiculous, counter-intuitive rules. Much later, I stood in Tikal, Guatemala in a Mayan ball court. There were stone rings set vertically on stone walls. A hard rubber ball had been sent through those goals, over a thousand years prior. Strict rules governed which parts of the body the players could use to contact the ball, much like today's soccer.
Another visitor at the archaeological site told me that the rules in the time of the Mayan Civilization dictated that the entire losing team was to be executed as human sacrifices. Hard rules, which I am convinced the players had no say in amending at their ball practices. They were, however, each given a Mayan Calendar, with which to keep track of the Ball Season. Most likely, the swapping of jerseys was frowned upon.
What can you do?
fin