296 crafts: further reading making; occupations; religion and cosmology; sacred sites; ships and shipbuilding; slaves and slavery; storage and preservation; textiles and needlework; trade and exchange; transportation; weaponry and armor; weights and measures FURTHER READING Barb Aston, Ancient Egyptian Stone Vessels: Materials and Forms (Heidelberg, Germany: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 1994) J D Cooney, Catalogue of Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum IV: Glass (London: British Museum, 1976) Ilay Cooper and John Gillow, Arts and Crafts of India (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996) George Wharton James, Indian Basketry, 2nd ed (New York: Dover, 1972) Geoff rey Killen, Ancient Egyptian Furniture, vol (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1980) Geoff rey Killen, Ancient Egyptian Furniture, vol (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1994) Paul T Nicholson and Ian Shaw, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999) P R S Moorey, Materials and Manufacture in Ancient Mesopotamia—The Evidence of Archaeology and Art: Metals and Metalwork, Glazed Materials and Glass (Oxford, U.K.: B.A.R., 1985) P R S Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) G M A Richter, The Furniture of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans (London: Phaidon Press,1966) Philip Steele, Clothes and Crafts in Roman Times (Milwaukee, Wis.: Gareth Stevens, 2000) Rebecca Stone-Miller, Art of the Andes from Chavín to Inca, 2nd ed (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002) ▶ crime and punishment introduction Crime was dealt with harshly in the ancient world Early human settlements had no legal codes, courts, prisons, or other systems for dealing with crime, so most often crime was punished by family retribution If someone committed a crime against another person, that person’s clan would hunt down the perpetrator and mete out punishment Crime was always a personal matter Because there were no nation-states, there was no such thing as a crime against the state or “society.” The victim of a crime was always a person The world’s earliest legal code, developed in Mesopotamia, specified particular punishments for particular types of crime While historians know about the existence of this code, no record of the code itself survives However, the later Code of Hammurabi, also from Mesopotamia, provides historians with a comprehensive legal code developed by a king for his people Historians are particularly interested in the prologue to the legal code, which outlines its rationale and moral underpinnings Hammurabi was one of the first rulers to see punishment not just as a form of retribution but also as a deterrent to crime His code was also the first to incorporate the notion of “an eye for an eye,” a phrase later used in the Bible to refer to the notion that a punishment should be proportional to the crime committed Early legal codes were also developed in China and India These codes were harsh by modern standards In China, for example, five forms of punishment were typically carried out Tattooing and disfigurement served to identify the person as a criminal, but still harsher punishments included castration, mutilation, and death Often, the manner of death differed for different sorts of crimes, also a common practice later under the Roman Empire Punishment could also vary by a person’s social class or, in the case of India, caste While the Code of Hammurabi purported to treat all people equally, in practice people of higher social classes often did not face the same harsh punishments that people of lower classes did; in fact, crimes were defined differently depending on the social classes of the perpetrators and victims In India the caste of a person often played a major role in the harshness of a person’s punishment Ancient Greece was the source of the modern jury system Until then, legal codes and administration were dictated by kings or a king’s delegates The ancient Greeks, however, devised the first system in which citizens took part in hearing cases and meting out punishment The ancient Romans were the first to distinguish between private crimes, such as assault and burglary, and public crimes, such as treason and bribery Prisons were not common in the ancient world, though ancient Assyria had some fairly large prisons Convicted criminals were swift ly punished in a variety of ways, including beating, having arms or hands cut off, or being put to death by various means, including hanging and crucifi xion Another common form of punishment was exile, meaning that a criminal was forced to leave the community Sometimes criminals were sold into slavery, and sometimes they were abandoned in remote areas, where they faced death by starvation or attack by wild animals AFRICA BY SAHEED ADERINTO Conceptualizations of crime vary from one part of Africa to another and from one time to another An act that constitutes a criminal offense in one culture might be permitted in another culture; an act treated as a criminal offense today might have been condoned in the past and vice versa As African societies moved from one period to the next in the course of their history, perceptions of crime, its control, and the punishment of offenders changed Any analysis of the history of crime requires a critical understanding of the socioeconomic, cultural, political, and other changes a society experienced in succeeding decades and centuries