Expression

Around 1792 BC a Babylonian king named Hammurabi united most of Mesopotamia under his rule. He is remembered less for his conquests than for what he carved onto a tall black stone pillar (a stele) for everyone to see: 282 laws, the most complete law code surviving from the ancient world. At the top of the stele, Hammurabi is shown standing before the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, receiving the authority to make law — a powerful claim that justice comes from the divine, not merely from the king's will. The laws themselves are specific and harsh by our standards, built on the principle of retaliation, lex talionis: 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' Punishments differed by social class, and many seem cruel today. Yet the Code was a real step forward: it meant the law was public, written, and the same for everyone in a class, so that the powerful could not simply do as they pleased and a victim could point to a known rule. The very idea that a ruler is accountable to a written, divinely-grounded law is one of civilization's great inventions — and it points forward to the perfect law God would give through Moses, and ultimately to the law of love in Christ.

Music may be older than speech itself. The oldest instruments we have found are flutes carved from bird bone and mammoth ivory, over 40,000 years old, discovered in caves in Germany — proof that the earliest humans sang, drummed, and piped long before they wrote anything down. For most of history, music lived only in memory and performance; it vanished as soon as the last note faded. That makes our next object astonishing. On a clay tablet from the city of Ugarit (in modern Syria), written in cuneiform around 1400 BC, scholars found not just lyrics but instructions for the notes and tuning — a hymn to the moon-goddess Nikkal. Decoded by the Assyriologist Anne Kilmer after years of study, the Hurrian Hymn No. 6 is the oldest substantially complete piece of written music in the world. When musicians play a modern reconstruction on a replica lyre, you are hearing, across three and a half thousand years, an echo of how an ancient person praised the divine in song. It reminds us that worship and music have always traveled together — a truth that will run through this entire year, from these first temple hymns all the way to Gregorian chant and the great Masses to come.

All good writing is built one sentence at a time, so we begin the year there. A strong sentence does three things: it is complete (subject + verb + full thought, like you learned in grammar), it is clear (a reader understands it the first time), and it is specific (it says something real, not vague). Compare a weak sentence — 'Sumer was a place that had stuff' — with a strong one — 'Sumerian scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks into wet clay to record grain and laws.' The second names exact people, actions, and things. This week's assignment, introduced today, is your diagnostic: write 8-10 strong, complete sentences about life in a Sumerian city, drawing on everything you learned this week (the ziggurat, scribes, irrigation, Hammurabi's law, trade). Include at least one statement, one question, one command, and one exclamation, and vary how your sentences begin. Write naturally and carefully — this shows your parent what to build on this year. Start the draft now; you may finish it as carry-over work.

We close the week where we began, with St. Michael. This week we saw human beings reaching for God in the very first cities — building ziggurats toward heaven, singing the oldest hymn to a deity, asking in the Epic of Gilgamesh what lies beyond death. Michael's name answers all of it: 'Who is like God?' No empire, no king, no idol. The longing was real, but only the true God could finally satisfy it — which is exactly what YOUCAT 1 told us on Monday. End by praying the Prayer to St. Michael for protection over the year ahead.