Natalie Feng

A black basalt stele, 2.25 meters tall and more than 3,700 years old, now stands in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Carved across its surface are thousands of lines of cuneiform script recording laws and regulations concerning social order. At the top of the stele are two carved figures. Based on where it was excavated—Mesopotamia in what is now western Iran—and historical knowledge of the region, the figure on the left is Hammurabi, king of ancient Babylon, and the figure on the right is the Mesopotamian god of justice, Shamash.

The god appears to be holding a rod and a ring, as if instructing the king. What is inscribed on this stele is in fact the earliest known written legal code in history: the Code of Hammurabi.

This inscription not only provides scholars with crucial insight into ancient Babylonian society, but also serves as important evidence for understanding the religious history of the time.

So what exactly is written on it?

At the beginning of the code, Hammurabi declares that after the gods of creation granted supreme authority over humankind to the great god Marduk, Marduk’s image became exalted in human hearts. Later, humanity established an eternal kingdom upon the earth—Babylon. What follows are various stories of the gods.

At the conclusion, Hammurabi proclaims that Marduk has entrusted him with the authority to rule humanity, to protect the people and bring them well-being. He calls upon the citizens of Babylon to heed the laws decreed by the gods.

Then come the laws themselves—one by one—covering marriage, property, civil disputes, and much more. For example, Article 148 states that if a wife becomes seriously ill and can no longer work, her husband must care for her and remain with her for life. Further down, Articles 196 and 200 contain the famous principle later summarized in the West as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

Why, then, did Hammurabi claim that these laws were handed down by the gods?

In ancient societies, people were seen as uncivilized, driven by instinct and raw emotion. It was impossible to make everyone submit through persuasion alone. The most effective means of rule was force—instilling fear. Fear produced obedience.

And what did people fear most? Nature.

They believed that behind natural phenomena stood powerful gods directing everything. People worshiped in temples, offering sacrifices to these deities. If they failed to do so, they feared divine anger—thunder, storms, floods, disasters that could destroy their homes.

Human beings were terrified of this mysterious force behind nature. Hammurabi claimed to be the messenger of that force. By borrowing the awe-inspiring authority of the gods, he gave his rule an unquestionable legitimacy and power.

“I am not ruling you on my own,” the message implied. “The gods have sent me. Who dares to object?”

This approach also simplified the enforcement of law. Suppose someone protested: “My wife is gravely ill and can no longer work. She’s a burden. Why can’t I abandon her? Why must I follow your law and care for her for life? Don’t I have the right to pursue my own happiness?”

No detailed explanation was needed. These were divine laws. Must the ruler of the universe explain every reason to humans? No. It simply is so. That sense of inevitability left no room for argument. For rulers, invoking divine authority was direct and effective to implement law. And what does law create? Order.

When people have rules and standards to guide their behavior—when there are laws to follow—society gains structure. This Mesopotamian civilization is one of the oldest traceable sources of Western religious history.

Over time, culture spreads, evolves, and diversifies. In the Middle East, proclaiming ideas and laws in the name of gods became a common method across many peoples—Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and coastal Mediterranean cultures. Each group believed in its own true god and rejected the gods of others.

Within Western religious history, one theory holds that under the influence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, a new form of worship evolved in the southeastern Mediterranean: Jewish monotheism. According to this view, the Jewish narrative system simplified earlier Middle Eastern polytheistic myths, concentrating the identities of sun gods, moon gods, storm gods, and others into a single deity.

From a governance perspective, polytheism had a weakness: it was diffuse. Some people favored the sun god, others the thunder god. In contrast, Jewish monotheism offered centralized unity. All believers worshiped one God and expressed one shared idea.

Combined with the history of the Jewish kingdom, this theology became a powerful force of national revival. The message was clear: “We are God’s chosen people. The land that was destroyed is the land promised to us. It will one day become a place of eternal peace and bliss. Even the Lord of the universe commands us to return to Jerusalem and rebuild.”

Under this unified belief, dispersed Jewish communities gathered with remarkable cohesion, rebuilding Jerusalem and living generation after generation according to the laws of one God.

In the first century, internal reform movements within Judaism transformed this idea. Traditional thought held that God had chosen only the Jewish people. Reformers proclaimed that God treated all humanity equally. This new vision was expressed through the story of Jesus, giving rise to Christianity.

By the fourth century, the Constantine the Great recognized Christianity’s efficiency in unifying ideology within the Roman Empire. Through imperial edicts, Christianity was promoted. By the late fourth century, it became the empire’s only legal religion. From then on, it spread across Europe. By controlling the Church—the institution authorized to interpret scripture—emperors could achieve spiritual unity among the populace. It became framework for social order.

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In the 17th century, René Descartes proposed, “I think, therefore I am.”

If our understanding of the world is based entirely on information given by others—and we cannot verify whether it is true—then how can we trust our conclusions? Descartes sought certainty. He wanted to discard all false knowledge and retain only what could not be doubted.

Boldly, he set aside everything he had learned and began anew, searching for an indubitable foundation. He found one: the very act of thinking. The fact that he was thinking could not be doubted. Thought became the new starting point for understanding the world.

This shift redirected focus from religious authority back to the individual mind, echoing ancient Greek inquiry. Rather than accepting doctrine, Descartes insisted on seeking and proving truth through personal reasoning.

From this approach emerged modern scientific logic: no idea is beyond question. Knowledge must be tested. Data must be gathered from scratch, observed, analyzed, and verified step by step.

In an age when Church authority was unquestioned, Descartes ignited a new theme: the self. Independent thought flourished. Freed from rigid dogma, inquiry expanded in all directions, ushering in an explosion of new knowledge—among them, modern science.

Science became a method of understanding the world: empirical, observable, testable, falsifiable, and stripped of mysticism. It seeks clear cause-and-effect relationships and advances knowledge step by step.

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Returning to 16th-century Christian Europe, ordinary people learned about the world primarily through scripture. Light symbolized holiness and divine grace. The rainbow represented God’s covenant after the flood.

For centuries, understanding of light remained symbolic and spiritual.

Then came Isaac Newton, born in 1643. At just 23, he passed sunlight through a prism and discovered that white light splits into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. White light was not pure but composite.

This insight explained everyday phenomena: why the rising sun appears red, why it turns yellow as it climbs, and why it appears white at noon. Blue light scatters more in the atmosphere, making the sky appear blue. Without the atmosphere, as in space, the sky is black. Raindrops act like prisms, producing rainbows.

Human understanding of light deepened. Newton and his successors helped create an age of reason—the scientific era.

In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell developed electromagnetic field theory, proposing that light is an electromagnetic wave—an oscillation of electric and magnetic fields at right angles. Its calculated speed matched the speed of light. Later, Heinrich Hertz experimentally confirmed electromagnetic waves.

By 1900, however, physicists faced the “ultraviolet catastrophe.” Classical theory could not explain the observed energy distribution of electromagnetic radiation.

That year, Max Planck proposed a radical hypothesis: energy is not continuous but emitted in discrete packets—quanta. This assumption resolved the ultraviolet catastrophe and opened the door to quantum theory.

Five years later, Albert Einstein extended this idea. In explaining the photoelectric effect, he argued that light itself consists of energy packets—later called photons. Light, once understood purely as a wave, also had particle-like properties.

From this insight emerged the principle of wave–particle duality. Matter, too, exhibited both wave and particle characteristics. Classical physics—rooted in Newton—became only part of a broader framework.

Thus, from divine law carved in stone to quantum theory reshaping reality, humanity’s journey reflects a profound shift: from explaining the world through gods, to explaining it through reason, experiment, and mathematical law.

From Hammurabi’s stele to Descartes’ doubt, from Newton’s prism to Planck’s quanta and Einstein’s photons, the thread running through this long story is not just the accumulation of knowledge, but the transformation of how humans justify authority, explain the world, and organize life. Science equips us with methods and tools that allow us to turn data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.