Let's Talionus, or the law of retaliation, is perhaps better known by the more familiar

maxim of taking an eye for an eye.

Although codes of law had been established many years previously, the formal enacting

of reciprocal justice is thought to have originated in Babylonian times, with an ancient code

proposed by Babylonian king, Hammurabi.

Carved onto a basalt pillar, sometime around the middle of the 18th century, BCE, Hammurabi's

code consists of 282 laws, outlining a variety of crimes, from simple theft to the refusal

of accepting corn as a payment for a drink, alongside the various punishments criminals

could expect to receive for perpetrating them.

It is here, over a thousand years before the creation of the Torah, later adapted as

the Old Testament, that we first find such retributive ideas as if a man has destroyed

the eye of a man, they shall destroy his eye, or if a man should knock out the teeth

of his equal, his teeth shall too be knocked out.

The code listed 25 crimes that were considered capital offenses, meaning those that were punishable

by death.

However, it isn't until the 16th century BCE that we see the first evidence of capital punishment

actually being carried out, with the enforced suicide of an Egyptian nobleman accused

of the heinous crime of practicing magic.

Although invariably skewed in favour of the wealthier classes, it could be said that

such penal laws were vital for the management of increasingly complex societies.

For better or worse, in the years since those first punishments were meted out, capital

punishment has been employed at some point by almost every nation and culture that has

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