Charles Bronson's mustachioed bloodlust in Death Wish may be a '70s cinematic touchstone, but his iconic thug-slugging vigilante, Paul Kersey, was nearly 4,000 years in the making. Sparked by his wife's murder and daughter's rape, Kersey's rampage through the New York City underworld traces all the way back to an ancient Babylonian leader named Hammurabi, who set his own thoughts on vengeance into stone.
The empire-expanding king, sixth ruler of the capital of Mesopotamia, reigned from 1792 to 1750 BC and enacted one of the world's first recorded sets of laws: 282 dictums known as the Code of Hammurabi. His prescriptions for justice range from primal (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) to strangely specific (physicians operating with bronze lancets paid for malpractice with their hands).
The most complete surviving version of Hammurabi's code, carved into a phallic 7.4-foot hunk of basalt, features a relief of the king receiving the laws from the sun god Shamash—a gift from the heavens that's still giving to an entire genre of entertainment: See Hamlet, prince of Danes/killer of uncles. Or The Count of Monte Cristo or Red Dead Redemption. Frankenstein's monster showed the good doctor some Hammurabi-style justice by strangling his wife; Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick was a basic fin-for-leg exchange. And just about every comic book hero ever drawn could be homage to the code: What is Batman, after all, but Paul Kersey with a cape and a tool belt?
