By Ronald Bruce Meyer I am not a scholar but a fan of history. I
also believe strongly in public support of public education, so
that even childless citizens are not compelled to live among
morons. So, hearing about what a crisis the American education
system is in – so much so that it can be remedied only by
changing to a business model, underpaying teachers, increasing
class size and computerizing the metrics of education “outcomes”
– it was with trepidation that I examined the history textbook a
student I know uses in his Baltimore County (MD) high school:
Modern World History: Patterns of Interaction, Houghton Mifflin,
1999. In it is not one mention of Hammurabi, the sixth
Babylonian king who ruled (by the most popular chronology) from
1792 BCE to 1750 BCE, or about 42 years. The law code he devised
about 1780 BCE is important for two reasons. The most important
reason is the light the Codex Hammurabi sheds on the secular
development of law. Even when historians mention Hammurabi, they
lie about his Codex