The Code of Hammurabi

19:27unknown:Selina who interpreted the omens?

19:30Misha Glenny:Well you had to be very highly trained to understand this. This is a very academic pursuit because you can have up to 10 ,000 possibilities just to understand the omens of a sacrificial animal alone, to understand what all these little signs on the liver are meaning. So there are people who I like to call them sort of divine translators. As Fran said, these are messages from the gods that people are reading and you have to understand the logic and the special codes that the gods are speaking in in order to do that. So the kings would employ a lot of these diviners to help him make all kinds of decisions, whether to go to war, which advisors he should trust and so on.

20:09unknown:So was the reading of omens and the messages essentially an elite phenomenon or was everyone, ordinary people, looking for omens every day as well?

20:21Misha Glenny:It all depends on how much money you have, what options are available to you, right? So, I mean, sacrificing a sheep is something that costs quite a lot of money, but you can also sacrifice a pigeon or a dove if you have less money. If you can't afford a pigeon, then you can also just pour flour out and watch how the cracks appear in the piles of flour that are being made.

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21:19unknown:Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

21:59unknown:To get back to the laws themselves, we have perhaps one of the most famous ones is an eye for an eye. I think they also have a separate law for teeth as well. Does this principle of equivalence apply throughout the code, i.e. the punishment equals the crime or fits the crime each time?

22:19Misha Glenny:It often appears, but not always, and not always in the way that we would expect. So, yes, if a man blinds the eye of another man, then he himself will be blinded, but that only applies if they are both of the upper class. If a man blinds the eye of an ordinary man, an upper class man blinding the eye of an ordinary man, then he has to pay a fine, and if he blinds the eye of a slave, then he has to pay an amount of money which equates to half the slave's value. So it entirely depends on the status of the people involved. In the case of crimes which result in some kind of financial loss, it often is pay up for the damage.

22:57Misha Glenny:So if you cut down your neighbour's date palm, then you have to pay to make up for it. But there are also lots of deterrents involved. So, for example, if you steal an ox from an ordinary person, you have to pay 10 times its value to deter people from doing that. But if you steal from the palace, you have to pay 30 times its value. If you can't afford to pay the fine at all, then you're killed. And if you steal anything at all from a temple, you're also killed because stealing from the gods is the worst thing of all. So there are quite a few punishments in the code which are very harsh. Death is prescribed quite a lot of times for things like burglary, sheltering criminals, helping slaves escape, adultery, rape, all kinds of things.

23:43Misha Glenny:So there are different ways that these equivalences play out depending on the scenario.

23:50unknown:Fran, Selina mentioned the different strata of society. What does the code tell us about social stratification in Hammurabi's time?

24:00Misha Glenny:No, well, Selina's absolutely right. and you can see this clear gradation depending on the social status of either the person who commits the offence or the person who is the victim of the crime. So there are three main categories. There's the Akkadian word awilum, which is just the normal word for a man, but also means a free citizen, and they're basically the highest status group. Then the second category is the mushkenum, which means someone who bows down, and they're a type of retainer. They used to be attached more to the palace, but in the old Babylonian period there was increasing privatisation, so often these people were actually working for a private middleman or businessman.

24:40unknown:And were they effectively slaves?

24:42Misha Glenny:No, they weren't. You know, they had certain rights, and they would keep a percentage, for example, of the crops that they were growing, but then the rest would have to be surrendered, or they would have in the old model to do duty for the king, such as military service or perhaps canal dredging. And then, I'm afraid, at the bottom of the pile, as mentioned, was indeed the slave, Wadam the male slave, Amtam the female one. And legally speaking, a slave couldn't be held liable. So, in principle, if a slave committed the crime, it was the owner of the slave who had liability.

25:16unknown:Martin, the Code anticipates problems with the judges who enforce these laws. This is hardly reassuring, is it, for an ordinary Babylonian? I think anybody from the legal profession who hears what I'm about to say will have a fit. But ultimately, any system of law, if described in sufficiently abstract terms, is more or less the same, right? Because you have to have the system of rules that people more or less agree on. You have to have a way of making sure that people more or less know what they are. You have to have someone who decides whether the rules are respected, and then you have to have a way of enforcing it.

25:47unknown:But then, if you're really clever, you also have to have a safeguard built in so that the enforcement works. and Hammurabi recognises that judges could be corrupt or, you know, subject to all sorts of influences and so he anticipates this and says that if a judgement issues a crooked verdict then they shall literally cause him to rise from his seat and he shall not sit again with the judges in judgement so he's banished and he has to pay, I think, 12-fold the amount at issue. But, you know, Hammurabi's code is a very fascinating source because it mixes the obvious and the non-obvious. So the judges, you know, that sort of makes sense.

26:22unknown:But there are all sorts of things built into it where it gets less obvious. So, for example, as my colleagues pointed out, if a person from the upper class destroys the eye of the person from the upper class, their own eye is destroyed. But if someone from a quote unquote lower class, then they give money. Now, how do you interpret this? One way of interpreting is, oh, well, the lower class is worth less, and so, you know, keep the eye safe, just dish out the cash. But if you flip it around and you think of it from the point of view of the poorer person in the lower class, they might say, well, actually, what is it to me if you lose your eye?

26:53unknown:Give me some dosh, and then I can actually improve the quality of my life. So it can be quite hard to work out what's going on and whose point of view these things are crafted for. So the judges are a nice example where that doesn't apply, and we can be sure of exactly what's going on. When you break into your beautiful Babylonian, as you have done one or two times so far, are you speaking Akkadian or Babylonian? Or what is the relationship between the two? Akkadian is today, I mean, the history of the nomenclature is very complicated. There was a time when people used Akkadian for what we now call Samarian.

27:25unknown:But today, Akkadian is Babylonian plus Assyrian plus Eblaite. So Babylonian and Assyrian would be two varieties of Akkadian. Fran, we've talked a little bit about witchcraft women don't come up in the code very often but they do have some rather surprising appearances can you tell us about that?

27:47Misha Glenny:Yes, so there is also the ambiguity of course with this term a whelan whether the free citizen is including both men and women and people are still debating exactly what a whelan means but some of the laws definitely concern women So, for example, there's a law about a woman innkeeper. And if she basically has criminals conspiring in the inn and she doesn't take them off to the palace to be held to account, then, unfortunately, the usual verdict in these laws, she will be put to death.

28:19unknown:She's put to death for not dubbing somebody in.

28:22Misha Glenny:For not turning them in. And to put this in context, many of the laws end with the word idark. he or she will be put to death. But it's interesting as well that women traditionally did run inns. So this was seen as an extension of the domestic sphere of the kitchen of cooking and providing food and drink for a family. In Gilgamesh, there's even a goddess who runs the inn at the edge of the world. We also do have laws concerning marriage and dowries, divorce, also laws about sexual crimes. Obviously, many of the laws in this area concern women. Some of the laws we can see as perhaps a little bit more favourable towards women, some of them not, you know, it's a mixed bag.

29:05Misha Glenny:And of course, we're always reading through the lens of our own time and culture. But for example, if a man marries a wife and she then develops a disease called Lachbombe, we know it's a skin disease, we don't know what. But in that case, he's allowed to marry again, but he must provide for that wife and provided with housing and the means to survive for the rest of her life.

29:28unknown:Selina, is the code really a sort of set of laws that were designed to be followed quite rigidly or is it more like a projection and assertion of Hammurabi's power?

29:42Misha Glenny:Well, they are never cited as a precedent. Judges do not refer to them when they're justifying any of their decisions. So it's actually quite a mystery. What were they actually for? Some people say, is it all just propaganda? I think not, because we have Hammurabi's letters and he does seem to follow some of the principles in the code, at least. There's one example where somebody has written to him saying that their merchant who has ransomed a soldier that they found abroad brought him home. But now who's going to pay the ransom money? And Hammurabi says Temple should pay for it. And that's exactly what is stipulated in one of his laws.

30:20Misha Glenny:So some people have argued maybe this is a collection of judgments or his personal opinions. Maybe it's a bit like English case law in some senses that this is a collection of examples, the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. These are not universal principles which are going to be followed in every case. But actually reality is very complex. And this could be more Hammurabi's vision of what a just society should look like. and it's interesting to note that the code would have stood in the courtyard of the temple of Shamash, God of Justice, and that's where the judges meet. So when the judges are deciding the cases, they will see Hammurabi's stela there.

30:59Misha Glenny:It's there as a reminder, a bit like having a portrait of the king or queen up on the wall in some official capacity and be reminded that this is the general sense of how justice should be conducted. But when it comes to details of individual cases, things can be different.

31:14unknown:And when he started to expand his territory militarily, is there evidence that, you know, when he took a city or a town, that he would impose the code on the newly conquered territory? Martin, do you know about that at all? We actually have almost the opposite. There is a letter where I think it's in, gosh, ABB 9, where he tells the person he's writing to to adjudicate the case according to the law, which now applies in the city of Amutbalum, implying A, that it's specific from one city to another, but potentially B, that now it might be like this, but later on I'm going to change it. So these sources, you know, when you really drill down and try and extract information from them, they can often end up being very treacherous.

32:04unknown:It's interesting because you've all three given us extraordinary detail about, you know, life, ordinary life, everyday life in Hammurabi's time. Where are you getting the evidence for that? What are the sources for those quotidian experiences? Thank you. And these are some of the things that I should have said at the start about Mesopotamia. You see, people have this idea that the further back you go in the past, the less evidence there is. So the story goes, we know everything about the Second World War. We know a lot about Julius Caesar. And before that, there were the Egyptians and friends who we don't know very much about.

32:36unknown:But that isn't true. So for Mesopotamia, there are hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets. They illustrate the most varied aspects of their writing. Now, you have to read between the lines. Mesopotamians had the intention of not committing very much to writing. So actually, one of the questions to ask about... Had the intention they didn't want to. Well, what I mean is that most things in Mesopotamia were left unwritten. So how to build a wall, unwritten. Most recipes, unwritten. Most information, unwritten. So one of the questions about Hammurabi is why is it one of the few things that actually got written down, this law code?

33:07unknown:But when you take all the things you did right and you read between the lines, then the amount of information becomes incredible. So we actually know the names of Hammurabi's major administrators. For example, in the city of Sippar, we can reconstruct archives. And all over the world today, there are people who are doing this for a living and making new discoveries. It's fascinating. Right. So cuneiform then goes into disrepair. I mean, it disappears at some point. When is it rediscovered and how do people start interpreting it?

33:36Misha Glenny:Well, basically, it becomes an unreadable and forgotten language for a long time. So cuneiform inscriptions can even be visible on the surface of the sites in Iraq, so like smashed up bricks that had inscriptions of kings. But certainly some of the earlier travellers in the area would argue that these were purely decorative. You know, they weren't even thinking of this as a way of recording language. So really, the great age of decipherment is in the 19th century. So this is finally when these inscriptions get their voice back and people start to decipher. Now, admittedly, the sort of material that they're first using to decipher Akkadian and re-kineiform is not material like our stele that we're talking about today.

34:20Misha Glenny:It tends to be much later from the first millennium. But this is really the time when these voices from the past become heard again. And as Martin has said, you know, the written record from ancient Mesopotamia is absolutely unparalleled with any other civilisation or culture in antiquity. It's extraordinary, the amount of material that we have.

34:40unknown:How many people were living in Babylonia at the time? Do we know? I think we don't, because there are really only three ways to access that kind of information. One is a census. One is working out how many people the land could support. And one is looking at physical remains of buildings and working out how many people could live there. The censuses we don't have. The buildings we haven't all dug up. And if we had, we wouldn't know how many people live there per room anyway. And how many people land can support is a very difficult question. So I think we have to pass on that particular one. I don't think Selina Raya can jump in there.

35:15unknown:You did mention those letters, those documentation from Mari. I mean, that sounds like an extraordinary find. Oh, it crops up in an Agatha Christie novel. I think there's a passage where one of the archaeologists wanders down the street, quote unquote, allowing his mind to dwell pleasantly on certain aspects of the Mari letters. And Agatha Christie was married to a Mesopotamian archaeologist. She may have been thinking of the letter where someone reported to the king of Mari, Hammurabi's sometime enemy, that a prophet had turned up at the city gate and devoured a raw lamb in front of the assembled elders.

35:49unknown:to make the point, as Fran was explaining earlier, the ominous sign carrying an impact in the real world because he was saying there will be a devouring that happens and so he kind of illustrated this by devouring the live lamb. The Maori letters are fantastic.

36:04Misha Glenny:I like one that talks about the river ordeal and attests that this is something that really, really happened. People were sent to the river. There's one story where eight people were charged with going into the river over a dispute over some property. One old man, he swims across, he makes it out alive. Then a woman goes in and she drowns. And then the others, they just all hold up their hands at that point and say, we admit it, the land is not ours, we relinquish all claim because they don't want the other women to die. People really died when they went to the river ordeal.

36:34unknown:So the river ordeal, I notice, is written in English with a capital O. Is that because, was the Euphrates suddenly called the river ordeal when witchcraft was around, or why is that?

36:46Misha Glenny:Well, it's referred to as the divine river in the cuneiform sources. Exactly. So it actually has a marker in front of the word for river that singled a god. So a sign that was originally a star, which is a marker of divinity. So, you know, the river ordeal was used in all sorts of different cases. So also, for example, in the law code, it's a collection of laws. It's used for a case of adultery. When you can't actually resolve the question of innocence or guilt with the evidence available to human judges, then you turn it over to the divine river god who is going to make the decision.

37:20unknown:Tough call if it comes your way. Selina, what about Hammurabi himself? Did he abide by his laws? Was he a just king?

37:30Misha Glenny:I think he did follow the principles that he sets out in his code. These letters show that he gets really involved with individual cases and he gets involved with small details. Sometimes people accuse him of micromanaging but you can also see that as really caring and attention to detail. Somebody writes to him, for example, saying that their son had disappeared eight years ago. They've been making offerings to him as if he were dead and suddenly they find out that actually he was kidnapped and is a slave in somebody else's house. He can't get him back every time he goes. They keep moving his location, so it's impossible.

38:04Misha Glenny:He writes to the king about this and the king sends people. He sends soldiers to go and get him back. So really, ordinary people could come to him when they had a problem and he would look into it.

38:15unknown:There seems to be a bit of a divide here about whether the laws actually were laws, because on the one hand, you're saying that they were ignored a lot of the time and they weren't implemented. On the other hand, we have this evidence of these cases being brought successfully.

38:33Misha Glenny:He cares about justice. I think that's the overriding principle. and the laws can't cover every example but I mean one of my favourite contradictions which is another one of these great paradoxes there is a law that says if somebody accepts something for safekeeping with no witnesses or no documents then that man is a thief, he will be killed but later on in the law code there is a law that says if somebody gives something to somebody for safekeeping with no witnesses and no documents then he has no basis for a claim to get it back Nothing about killing anybody involved there is clearly not a universal principle that is applied strictly in every case.

39:14Misha Glenny:So why is there a contradiction? And I think if you look at the context in which these laws appear, it's quite interesting because the first one is in a series of provisions which is all about misconduct of justice, making sure judges do not go back on their word, consequences of theft. And the other one is in a sequence of cases about what happens if you deposit something in somebody else's granary and then it goes missing for some reason. If somebody is siphoning it off, then they will be punished. But what is common to both of those cases is that it's about establishing proper evidence. And one is a worst case scenario from the point of view of somebody who accepts this property for safekeeping and one from the point of view of the person who's giving it.

39:58Misha Glenny:In both cases, you have to have documents and witnesses. And that is the underlying principle that these laws are illustrating.

40:05unknown:Martin, in the 19th century, there was this surge of interest in Mesopotamia, even before the Steela was discovered. What accounts for that fascination for Mesopotamia in the Victorian period? If I had to choose two words, I'd probably say empire and the Bible. So the French dug wonderful stuff up. And so the Brits said, we want it too. so Austen Henry Layard, an adventurer, goes off. Stratford Canning ambassador in Constantinople gives him money. So on the one hand, this is a way of a colonial power, you know, digging stuff out of the ground, but also it's a connection to hoary antiquity. This is a time when geology is being discovered, so now the deep history of the world is coming to human awareness.

40:44unknown:Darwin's talking about evolution, so maybe the world isn't as old as the Bible says it is. On the other hand, the clay tablets are also telling us the story of Noah. So does this prove that the Bible, there's a collection of Mesopotamian fairy tales? Is it independent vindication of the biblical account? So to Victorians, Mesopotamia, and also there's the whole nationalist dimension to the decipherment, as Fran said. The decipherment was actually done by a very clever Irishman, Edward Hinks. But then the credit went to a British major general. And so for 100 years, the history books all said, oh, you know, British major general deciphered cuneiform.

41:16unknown:And Gilbert and Sullivan in the Pirates of Penzance glorify his ability to write shopping lists in Babylonic cuneiform. but I think that that was sustained at the time by factors which may be of less interest to us but in the meantime other things have taken over I mean the Code of Hammurabi is part of a larger textual universe in Mesopotamia so there are law codes before Hammurabi it's not the earliest law code and then there was a tradition of commentary so there are tablets that have extracts with headings which is a very human thing to do as Selino explained sometimes a group of laws seem to fall into a sort of thematic unit and people actually go and write the headings in just like us but then going back to the river ordeal there's a very late commentary, a fragment of clay, maybe three centimetres wide, which is a commentary on the law code of Hammurabi, and it says that the god of the river ordeal is the god air, the god of fresh water.

42:03unknown:And so there's always wheels within wheels and interpretations within interpretations. And part of the fascination of Assyriology today is our ability to unpack these things and bring them back to life and make them speak. Fran, we're getting towards the end, but tell us what happens to Hammurabi's kingdom after he dies.

42:22Misha Glenny:We can see a really marked trajectory because in a sense the reign of Hammurabi marks the peak of power of this first dynasty of Babylon. You know, he conquers this huge area of territory as we heard about in the prologue. He's an extremely able king. After his death there are five successors and the dynasty does continue for about another 155 years but basically the sort of step downwards in terms of decline. So I think in a sense even during his reign there was a weakness in the system with all this privatisation, outsourcing, there was a move towards more of a gig economy, there was a real problem with debt burden.

43:03Misha Glenny:That was not a healthy aspect of society. Then after his death we find that his son as successor is actually struggling with rebellions in the south of Babylonia. So there's political unrest in the south. There's a very powerful kingdom of sealand, about which we now know more, thanks to some relatively recent texts. And we find as well that the south then is largely abandoned. So there's this extraordinary shift of people from the traditional cities in the south up into northern Babylonia. So really famous, prestigious Mesopotamian cities like Nippur and Ur are basically abandoned.

43:39unknown:And we see references, Selina, to the Code of Hammurabi for the next thousand years or so, as I understand. But more recently, there's this other part of his legacy. He's memorialised in the US Capitol and in the International Court of Justice. Why is he seen as such an important figure in modern law?

44:00Misha Glenny:There are many similarities between the Lords of Hammurabi and the laws in the Bible. And so this puts Hammurabi in the line of tradition of a culture that people are already familiar with, which is Moses as a great lawgiver. So in that sense, he slots quite neatly into one of these stories of the development of law worldwide. So that's why I think he became very well known when he was first discovered and why it meant a lot to people today.

44:29unknown:My thanks to Fran Reynolds, Selina Wisnam and Martin Worthington. Next week, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever. We'll be discussing the romantic poet John Keats. Thanks for listening.

44:42Misha Glenny:And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

44:51unknown:What did we miss out? Fran, what did we miss out?

44:55Misha Glenny:I wouldn't say we missed out, but something I think is very interesting in terms of the use of the laws is that they're very commonly the first texts that students read when they're learning Akkadian. So students studying Akkadian all over the world, often the first thing they will read is law one. Shuma, awilam, awilam, nerta, medina, if a man accuses another man of murder. So this is another afterlife of Hammurabi. It actually is a text which is used today for teaching.

45:26unknown:Just while we're talking about the language how do you reconstruct a language which disappears for millennia and then reappears in cuneiform? How do you know how it's pronounced? What's an A? What's a W? What's an L? So the short answer is that Babylonian and Assyrian are related to Hebrew and Arabic.

45:49Misha Glenny:So they're Semitic languages.

45:50unknown:And the sounds of Semitic languages tend to be a lot more stable than those of Indo-European ones. Then we have transcriptions into Hebrew and Greek letters occasionally and patterns of spelling. If you look how this sound is spelt under these conditions and spelt under those conditions, you can work out if it's a ch or a glottal stop or a m. The long answer is very long. OK, we won't go for the long answer, but tell me, Martin, what we missed out. You know, I think it's when I look at the stele, I always think it looks to me like an admonishing finger. and I don't know if that's a coincidence because actually in Babylonian culture to stretch out the finger is something not very good so maybe that's not something Hammurabi would have wanted to do so maybe it's just a complete coincidence what else?

46:35unknown:well when Fran and I were fortunate enough to talk on this programme about Gilgamesh I actually ran into someone who said he listened to the show and really enjoyed the show so he went and read Gilgamesh and got a massive headache and sort of ran away crying and I thought well maybe something that we should have built into the show at the time was to explain that these were compositions meant for intensive readers who would read the same thing over and over again and appreciate all sorts of subtleties that the first time reader just ploughing through at once doesn't really pick up on so maybe we should have prepared someone so with Hammurabi there's a similar point which is aspects of it seem to be self-explanatory but there are so many problems and questions nestling among the folds of it that you really want to read it with a commentary or with a serological guidance to make it safe.

47:24unknown:Selina, what about you? What would you have liked to have added?

47:27Misha Glenny:I've got two short things, if I may.

47:29unknown:You may.

47:30Misha Glenny:So the first law, I think, is actually quite important. If a man accuses another man of murder but cannot prove it, that man will be killed. that is a very radical departure from how other law codes previously were stating things. Before it's if a man commits murder he will be killed. OK, fine. But Hammurabi is really stating do not go around making false accusations that you cannot prove unless you are very, very sure. So right from the beginning he's making a strong statement about a commitment to justice which is different from what has gone before.

48:01unknown:And your second point?

48:03Misha Glenny:And my second point is one of my favourite underrated laws is one that stipulates how much people pay for medical treatment and ordinary people pay half the amount that the elite pay for their medical treatment.

48:15unknown:Well, that sounds quite... Isn't that nice?

48:16Misha Glenny:Yes, it is.

48:18unknown:Can I slip in one more thing? Yes. So in 1898, Bruno Meissner wrote a paper with the dribs and drabs of tablets that we now know to be copies of Hammurabi and the British Museum saying, oh, you know, we've got all these laws, presumably there was some kind of code, Well, they seem to be very old. The spelling is old. It's the kind of thing that that famous king of hoary days Hammurabi might have written. And then three years later, they find the steely of Hammurabi with law code. It must have been too good to be true. So that's fantastic. Fran, one thing, of course, that, well, we mentioned it, but only alluded to it really is, is these stories which we know from the Bible are, if not identical, then very similar to the stories from Mesopotamia.

49:06unknown:When that came out, did people begin to say, well, maybe the Bible's just pinched everything from the Mesopotamians?

49:14Misha Glenny:Well, in a sense, of course, when these sorts of compositions are being read in the 19th century, it presented an enormous intellectual and spiritual challenge to basically discover that on tablets that were much older than any of the biblical sources, you, for example, had an account of the flood. The flood story and the Gilgamesh epic, it's not identical to the story of Noah, but there are enough points of similarity, including the release of birds, that I think it's clear that you're dealing with another version of the same thing. So, you know, in a way, the people who were initially working on this material, they ended up being really in the front line of intellectual debate of the day.

49:55Misha Glenny:This wasn't just sort of dusty scholars tucked away in their offices and nobody else was interested. This was kind of hot news. You know, you're getting coverage in the Illustrated London News. The Illustrated London News, presumably, yes. You know, it's quite galvanised society at the time. Quite shocking, really.

50:11unknown:Should we mention Babel and Bibel?

50:13Misha Glenny:Go for it.

50:14unknown:Mention. So I think it was in the 1920s. There's a very, very brilliant mind in Assyriology, Friedrich Delitzsch. I mean, you have to understand that, you know, in German academia at the time, these people were rock stars. So Friedrich Delitzsch actually gave a series of lectures called Babel und Bibel, Babel and the Bible, which was attended by Kaiser Wilhelm II, which in the context of anti-Semitism in the day, basically said that Hebrew culture is nothing but stolen from Babylon, etc., etc. and actually the Kaiser distanced himself and didn't attend the third lecture. So that was a very ugly chapter in the story.

50:47unknown:What, the Kaiser distanced himself because it was too anti-Semitic by implication? So actually I don't know if the Kaiser was offended by the anti-Semitism as such, but of course in the context of today when people are very appreciative of the Hebrew Bible in concept of Christianity, I don't think the Kaiser appreciated the attack on the Hebrew Bible qua foundation of Christianity. right well at that juncture i think we can get simon to come and offer us a cup of tea

51:11Misha Glenny:well thank you so much thank you very much indeed so ready for the tea ordeal yes how far do we have to swim

51:24Misha Glenny:tea for me oh tea would be wonderful thank you i mean a peppermint tea yes yes yeah thank you That'd be great.

51:30unknown:The water would be fantastic. Thank you very much.

51:32Misha Glenny:Thank you. In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. What would you do if your deepest secrets were held to ransom? In 2020, every patient who had used a Finnish psychotherapy service called Vastamor had their therapy notes stolen and held to ransom by a faceless, remorseless hacker.

51:58unknown:It could be some extortionist gang from Eastern Europe, or it could be somebody living next door to me.

52:05Misha Glenny:I'm Jenny Kleeman. Join me as I discover just how vulnerable our deepest secrets can be. I think I'm going to have a heart attack. From BBC Radio 4 and Intrigue, this is Ransom Man. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

52:27unknown:This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.