IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 215

Babylon began as a small city-state on the Euphrates and became the dominant power of southern Mesopotamia under its sixth king, Hammurabi, who reigned from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. He inherited a modest kingdom; by his death he had defeated rival dynasties and controlled a territory stretching far beyond the city walls. Governing so large and mixed a population required more than soldiers. Near the end of his reign Hammurabi ordered a summary of justice to be carved on a stone monument and set up in public, so that his fairness would be known.

The monument that survives, usually called the Code of Hammurabi, is a stele: an upright slab of black basalt about two and a quarter metres tall and rather less than a metre wide. It was not found in Babylon. In the winter of 1901–02 a French expedition led by Jacques de Morgan, working at the ancient site of Susa in what is now Iran, uncovered it in three pieces, which were afterwards rejoined. The team recognised the importance of the object at once, and it was sent to Paris, where it has been displayed in the Louvre ever since.

Susa, however, was a capital of Elam, a kingdom frequently at war with Mesopotamia, and the stele had almost certainly arrived there as plunder. The Elamite king responsible is generally identified as Shutruk-Nakhunte I, who invaded Babylonia in the twelfth century BCE and carried off a number of its monuments. Where the stele originally stood is therefore uncertain. Some historians place it in Babylon itself, others in Sippar, a city to the north, where part of a copy of the text was later excavated.

The inscription is written in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Babylon, in wedge-shaped cuneiform signs. It opens with a long prologue in which the gods are said to have chosen Hammurabi to bring justice to the land, and closes with an epilogue praising his achievements and cursing any future ruler who altered the text. Between the two stand 282 provisions, covering marriage and divorce, inheritance, debts, wages, irrigation, farming and professional liability. So far as anyone can tell, the text contains no names of individual litigants, no arguments and no verdicts.

At the top of the stele, above the text, a relief shows the king standing in front of a seated deity with his hand raised. The figure is generally identified as Shamash, the sun god and patron of justice, though a minority of scholars argue for Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon. The scene is often described as the king receiving the laws from the god, but nothing in the inscription supports that reading; it says only that the gods called Hammurabi to establish justice.

Some provisions are strikingly specific. A surgeon who saved the life of a free man received ten shekels of silver, half that sum for a commoner and two shekels for the owner of a slave; if a free patient died under the knife, however, the surgeon could lose his hands. A builder whose house collapsed and killed its owner could be sentenced to death. A farmer who let his field flood was required to pay for the ruined crop in grain. Read together, the provisions give an unusually detailed picture of everyday economic life, from the hire of oxen to the price of beer.

The laws divide society into three groups: free citizens, a dependent class whose exact status is still argued over, and slaves, who were property and could be bought and sold. Penalties differed sharply according to the group to which a victim belonged. The principle of exact retaliation — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bone for a bone — applied only when two free citizens of equal standing were involved; where the injured party was a commoner or a slave, the offender paid a fine in silver instead.

It is also a mistake to suppose that the code is complete. It says nothing about a great many situations that must have come before the courts, and it offers no reasoning. One long-standing view holds that it was never meant to be applied literally, but was a royal statement of the king's commitment to order, an object for display rather than a working manual. Others point to references in later documents to judgements made in Hammurabi's name and argue that its provisions were used in practice. The truth is probably that the text served both purposes, and the surviving evidence is unlikely to settle the argument.

The monument has gaps as well as mysteries. Several columns on the front were erased in antiquity, presumably by the Elamite king or his scribes, and part of the epilogue was scraped away. Fortunately, scribes elsewhere had copied the text onto clay tablets, and scholars have restored most of the missing laws from copies found at several sites.

Hammurabi's code was not the first collection of laws in Mesopotamia. A code attributed to Ur-Nammu, a king of Ur, was compiled roughly three centuries earlier, and another was issued by Lipit-Ishtar of Isin. What makes Hammurabi's monument remarkable is its scale, its careful organisation and, above all, the fact that it was cut in stone and set up for the public to read. The idea that justice should be written down, so that the powerful could not alter it at will, has echoed through legal history ever since.

Palaeography is the study of historical handwriting: the analysis of the scripts people used before typewriters and computers, and of what those scripts can tell us about the documents that carry them. Its practitioners work in archives, libraries and universities, and their skills are needed whenever an old document has to be read, dated, described or authenticated. A deed may lack a date, a letter may be unsigned, and a margin may carry a scrawl nobody has noticed for two centuries. Before such items can be catalogued or quoted, someone has to work out what the letters are and when they were written.

The first difficulty is that few early documents spell everything out. Medieval scribes saved parchment, ink and time by abbreviating, and a single letter with a mark above it might stand for a whole word. A stroke through the stem of a letter commonly signalled that a syllable had been left out, while a curl at the end of a word might mean that the writer had omitted a standard Latin ending. Hundreds of such signs were in routine use, and scribes expected readers to recognise them from context. A transcriber who ignores them produces nonsense; one who knows the conventions can restore the missing letters with confidence in all but a few cases.

Individual letters, too, can be surprisingly hard to tell apart. In the secretary hand used by English writers from the early sixteenth century until well into the seventeenth, the forms of c and t, of n and u, and of m and in are close enough to confuse even a trained eye, and letters were often joined in ways that modern readers do not expect. Older manuscripts add their own traps. The letter thorn, which represented the sound 'th', survived in English writing for centuries and looks much like a 'y', which is why the phrase 'ye olde' still appears on the signs of tea shops.

Spelling itself was not fixed before the eighteenth century, even for the same author, and this has consequences for anyone trying to date a document. So does the calendar. Until 1752 England used a year that began on 25 March, and dates falling between 1 January and 24 March were therefore written with the number of the old year: a document dated 20 February 1648 was written in what we would call 1649. Historians usually record such dates as 1648/9. England also lagged behind much of Europe in adopting the reformed calendar, so a date in an English letter may be ten or eleven days earlier than the equivalent date recorded on the continent.

Dating by handwriting alone is a comparative exercise. Palaeographers assemble dated documents — charters with a year in them, deeds witnessed by known officials — and arrange the scripts in sequence, noting when a particular form of a letter first appears and when it dies out. This produces a range rather than a precise date, and the range is only as narrow as the surviving evidence allows. The method has an important limit: it can show that a document is not earlier than a certain date, but a scribe might copy an old-fashioned style or write in a deliberately archaic hand, so a much later date cannot be ruled out. Forgery is the extreme case, and it is why palaeography is used alongside ink analysis and documentary evidence.

Science has made some apparently illegible writing readable again. Parchment was expensive, and medieval scribes often scraped the ink from an old manuscript and wrote over it, producing what is called a palimpsest. The erased text can sometimes be recovered because the original ink has left traces in the surface of the skin. Multispectral imaging, which photographs a page under many wavelengths of light, can make those traces visible where the eye sees nothing. The best-known result is the recovery, in the early years of this century, of works by the Greek mathematician Archimedes that had been hidden beneath a religious text.

The newest challenge is machine reading. Handwriting is far harder for computers than printed type, because the same letter is never written twice in exactly the same way. Research groups in several European countries have built software that learns from large numbers of transcribed pages and then proposes a reading for documents it has never seen; the platform known as Transkribus is the best known. Such systems work best on consistent hands and on the formal scripts of later periods, and they still make mistakes that a human must correct. For large archival collections, however, they have transformed what is possible.

That is fortunate, because the number of people able to read old hands is small and, many archivists argue, shrinking. The study of Latin and of the historical forms of European languages has declined in schools and universities, and palaeography is often taught for only part of a degree. Some digital projects have responded by recruiting volunteers, who transcribe pages from home after a short period of training, and the results have been used by professional historians. Whether this amounts to a rescue is disputed. Volunteers transcribe what interests them, which is not necessarily what researchers need, and someone still has to check the work.

Even the terminology can mislead. The word 'palaeography' is sometimes used loosely for the study of old documents in general, but the discipline properly concerns writing. Its close relative, diplomatics, deals with the form and authenticity of official documents, and the two are usually studied together. Neither is the same as epigraphy, which is devoted to inscriptions cut in stone or metal.

Few museum objects are as persuasive as a ship. Stand beneath the hull of the Vasa in Stockholm, or beside the Mary Rose in Portsmouth, and the seventeenth or sixteenth century becomes suddenly tangible: the scale of the timbers, the marks of tools, the smell of old oak, and for a moment the distance between the present and the past seems to close. It is easy, in such places, to feel that preservation is obviously right. Yet the conservation of a great historic ship is one of the most demanding and expensive commitments a museum can take on, and a growing number of voices argue that it is a commitment we should sometimes decline.

The case for keeping such vessels is not merely sentimental. A ship is a machine, and the way it was built, rigged and provisioned records technical knowledge that documents rarely describe in detail. The Mary Rose has yielded thousands of objects, among them longbows, backgammon boards and a barber-surgeon's chest, which together tell us how ordinary people lived at sea. Preservation also sustains crafts, since the shipwrights, riggers and conservators trained on such projects are the people who maintain other historic structures. And there is the plain fact of public appetite. Visitors who would not read a scholarly article will queue for an hour to stand on a deck.

The difficulty is that a wooden ship, once lifted out of the water, begins to fall apart. Timbers that were saturated for centuries dry out, shrink and split, and the iron bolts that hold them corrode. Conservators have therefore had to invent treatments as they go. The Vasa was sprayed for years with polyethylene glycol, a waxy substance that replaces the water in the wood and holds the cells open, and was then left to dry very slowly; the Mary Rose went through a similar process. Even so, the work is never finished. Researchers have found that sulphuric acid is slowly forming inside the Vasa's timbers, and keeping it at bay requires constant monitoring.

The bills are correspondingly large. Raising, treating, housing and interpreting a ship is a project measured in decades, and the buildings that shelter the biggest vessels are themselves major works of engineering. Money spent on a single hull is money not spent on the hundred other vessels, warehouses, docks and documents that tell the same story. The sums involved are rarely announced in advance, and they have a habit of growing: a treatment expected to take five years may still be running a decade later. Every curator knows this, and few say it in public, because a ship attracts donations in a way that a collection of ledgers never will.

Then there is the awkward matter of authenticity. A wooden ship is not a fixed object. The Cutty Sark, launched in 1869 and badly damaged by fire in 2007 while under conservation, has been repaired and rebuilt so often that the question of how much original fabric remains is genuinely difficult to answer. HMS Victory, laid down in the 1750s and dry-docked at Portsmouth since 1922, has been restored repeatedly over more than two centuries. What visitors see in such cases is a collaboration between eighteenth- or nineteenth-century shipwrights and modern conservators. That is not dishonest, but it is rarely explained.

Some critics go further and argue that ships should be allowed to decay, on the grounds that a hull quietly returning to the soil is more honest than one held together by hidden armatures and new timber. I have some sympathy with the impulse behind this, but I think it is mistaken. Decay is not a form of respect; it is simply an outcome. Nor are the alternatives so stark. A vessel can be recorded in exhaustive detail, with every timber measured, photographed and sampled, before being reburied or broken up, a practice archaeologists call preservation by record.

We should not assume, either, that everything can be saved. There are hundreds of historic vessels afloat, from fishing smacks to ocean liners, and the resources to look after them do not exist. Choosing is therefore unavoidable, and the criteria should be explicit: the rarity of the type, the quality of the surviving fabric, the research the ship makes possible, and whether the money spent will produce something the public can learn from. A vessel that is merely old, with little original material left and no plausible future, is a poor candidate for a national appeal. Even the grandest ships compete for the same pool of visitors, and a fleet of preserved vessels can end up with none of them properly maintained.

My own view is that preservation is justified where it is honest, funded and useful: where the restored parts are identified as such, where the ship supports real research, and where the cost does not quietly consume the rest of a museum's budget. What I reject is the romanticism at both extremes — the belief that every hull must be saved because it is old, and the belief that letting a hull rot is somehow more authentic than mending it. A ship is a made thing, repaired throughout its working life. Continuing to repair it is not a betrayal of its history; it is what its builders would have expected.