Reply #27: well...

[BigMcLargehuge]

Considering China was an advanced soceity some 5000 years ago with large population centers they too practiced some version of these basic tennets otherwise their society would have collapsed.

I think these rules are required to keep a society together. However, as with any large group of people gathered in one geographic location, there will always be some percentage that ignored/flaunts those rules.

The Mesapotamian empire ceased to exist as a sole power, in some estimation, hundreds of years before the old testament was written. But their legacy is still felt in several places in the bible. The story of Utnapishtim as told in the oldest recorded western story, Gilgamesh, precedes Noah's flood by several hundred years, but contains the same central events. The reasons for the flood though illustrate the different take the Mesapotamians had on their pantheon of Gods. In this tale Humans are a pain in the ass and therefore must we exterminated.

As for Hammurabi... The Mesapotamian empire was overtaken by the Egyptians, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Byzantines, then the Muslims, and since the laws were so detailed (like for example, the number of bags of grain one had to pay if you accidentally killed a neighbors waterbuffalo, or the ability to bring an arbiter to speak for you in front of an adjudicator, character witnesses, and costs in detail) they inevitably were simplified as these laws moved from early "urban" societies into the nomadic groups outside the established cities. Add hundred of years of conquest, societal mixing, and the end product is, what I think of as, gross oversimplification.

Again though, this only applies to the civil related portions of the commandments. The religion aspect, no god before me, no craven idols, sabbath hooey has no relation to civilization, but to establishing/maintaining a belief system.