Keita's Burogu

      Hello, everyone. Today I will write about Babilonia. Do you know what Babilonia is? You are science students, so I guess not all of you know this. Babilonia is an ancient civilization. This is famous for establishing the world's oldest statutory law, called the Code of Hammurabi. This is written by unknown letters (at least when it was found), so it was not until 1835 that researchers found out what it says. At the Louvre museum, you can see this engraved on a stone.     This stipulated how criminals should be punished. Those look very severe to today's civilians. For example, death penalties were applied for females who had entered a pub, those who had harbored fleeing slaves, and females who had divorced their husbands without a "good" reason. The stipulation also included a lot of elements from the superstition of Babilonia. When there were conflicts between Babylonians, defendants were forced to dive into a river. It was believed that guilties would dr...

    Happy new year, everyone. How was your winter vacation? I was working part-time at a shrine. That was a great experience, and I will never forget it.     These days, I have a lot of books that I bought but have not read yet. The Japanese translation of The Intellectual Devotional is one of them. Readers are expected to read 1 topic a day, which helps them to gain general knowledge. Today I read an article about the alphabets and their history.      The article focused on why alphabets were established. Around 2000 B.C., The Egyptian leaders had a problem. They had many slaves that they got throughout many wars, and they had trouble conveying orders to them because they couldn't read Egyptian sentences. Egyptian was written by characters called hieroglyph then, and it was so complicated that even Egyptians had difficulties. Just in case you don't know what characters are, they represent meanings, not sounds. After these difficulties, leaders decided...