Wherever the Phoenicians journeyed, they established settlements. Most of these were merely trading posts which contained the warehouses for the storage of their goods. Here the shy natives came to barter their raw materials for the finished products--cloths, tools, weapons, wine, and oil--which the strangers from the East had brought with them. Phoenician settlements sometimes grew to be large and flourishing cities. The colony of Gades in southern Spain, mentioned in the Old Testament as Tarshish, [10] survives to this day as Cadiz. The city of Carthage, founded in North Africa by colonists from Tyre, became the commercial mistress of the Mediterranean. Carthaginian history has many points of contact with that of the Greeks and Romans. 16. LAW AND MORALITY BABYLONIAN CONTRACTS It is clear that societies so highly organized as Phoenicia, Egypt, and Babylonia must have been held together by the firm bonds of law. The ancient Babylonians, especially, were a legal-minded people. When a man sold his wheat, bought a slave, married a wife, or made a will, the transaction was duly noted on a contract tablet, which was then filed away in the public archives. Instead of writing his name, a Babylonian stamped his seal on the wet clay of the tablet. Every man who owned property had to have a seal. CODE OF HAMMURABI The earliest laws were, of course, unwritten. They were no more than the long-established customs of the community. As civilization advanced, the usages that generally prevailed were written out and made into legal codes. A recent discovery has given to us the almost complete text of the laws which Hammurabi, the Babylonian king, ordered to be engraved on stone monuments and set up in all the chief cities of his realm. [11] SUBJECT MATTER OF HAMMURABI'S CODE The code of Hammurabi shows, in general, a high sense of justice. A man who tries to bribe a witness or a judge is to be severely punished. A farmer who is careless with his dikes and allows the water to run through flood his neighbor's land must restore the value of the grain he has damaged. The owner of a vicious ox which has gored a man must pay a heavy fine, provided he knew the disposition of the animal and had not blunted its horns. A builder who puts up a shaky house which afterwards collapses and kills the tenant is himself to be put to death. On the other hand, the code has some rude features. Punishments were severe. For injuries to the body there was the simple rule of retaliation: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a limb for a limb. A son who had struck his father was to have his hands cut off. The nature of the punishment depended, moreover, on the rank of the aggrieved party. A person who had caused the loss of a "gentleman's" eye was to have his own plucked out; but if the injury was done to a poor man, the culprit had only to pay a fine.