No Hard Hats, but Hammurabi: If There Had Been Workplace Safety in Antiquity
Hammurabi held the builder responsible for a collapsed house. Roman paint workers tied bladders over their faces to keep out dust. Vitruvius noticed that working with lead ruined workers' health. The roots of workplace safety are older than we think.
Translated from the Turkish original: Türkçesini oku
IN SHORT
There were no safety officers in the ancient world, but there was an awareness of danger. The Laws of Hammurabi made the builder responsible for a collapsed house. Pliny wrote that workers handling red pigment tied bladders over their faces to protect themselves from dust. Vitruvius noticed the pallor of workers who handled lead and recommended clay pipes.
Today, before you walk onto a construction site, you put on a hard hat, then a high-visibility vest, and finally you glance at the sign on the wall that says “Follow the safety rules”. The ancient world had neither hard hats nor risk assessment reports. But it did have people who noticed danger, recorded it and looked for ways to prevent it. In this part of the series, let us look at the ancient world through the eyes of a safety officer.
Hammurabi: the employer’s responsibility
What do the Laws of Hammurabi say about construction accidents?
The laws that King Hammurabi of Babylon had inscribed in stone around 1750 BC include provisions for builders. If a builder builds a house that is not sound, and the house collapses and kills its owner, the builder himself is put to death. If the collapse destroys property, the builder pays for all of it and rebuilds the house at his own expense. If a wall begins to lean before the work is finished, he must strengthen it, again at his own expense.1
By today’s standards the penalties are far too harsh. But the idea underneath is familiar: whoever builds a structure is responsible for its safety. Today we call this the responsibility of the employer and the contractor. In Hammurabi’s time, though, there was no “near miss” report. Either the accident had not happened or it had; there was nothing in between.
Pliny: one of the earliest known dust masks
How did workers in antiquity protect themselves from dust?
The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, describing minium, a red pigment, in his Natural History, gives an important detail. Workers who processed this substance in workshops tied loose bladders over their faces so that they would not breathe in the harmful dust. The bladders were thin enough that the workers could still see through them.2
This is considered one of the earliest known examples of personal protective equipment (PPE). Whether it worked is debatable, since dust could easily get in around the edges. Still, two thousand years ago someone noticed that the dust was harmful and tried to find a precaution. The mask had no safety certificate, but the intention was right.
Vitruvius: the price of lead
Did the Romans know that lead was harmful?
In his book on architecture, written in the 1st century BC, the architect Vitruvius recommends clay pipes instead of lead when discussing water supply. His reasoning is interesting: look at the workers who cast lead, he says. He writes that the fumes from casting settle on their bodies, weaken them a little more every day and leave them pale.3
What Vitruvius does is nothing other than the observation on which occupational health rests today: noticing that a particular illness keeps recurring among people who do a particular job. The seed of the idea of occupational disease lies in these lines.
The importance of keeping records
Were workplace accidents recorded in ancient Egypt?
Remember the attendance register from Deir el-Medina that we described in the post on working life in the ancient world. Next to one absent craftsman, the scribe noted “stung by a scorpion”.4 In today’s language, that is a recorded workplace accident. Recording an accident is the first step towards preventing it. We do not know whether the Egyptian scribe knew this, but he did the right thing.
What has changed?
Hammurabi’s builder, Pliny’s paint worker and Vitruvius’s lead caster are different faces of the same truth: work can cost people their health. What has changed is that we no longer leave this to chance. We carry out risk assessments, provide training and use protective equipment. Then again, you can still walk onto a site and see someone carrying their hard hat in their hand instead of wearing it. Some habits are older than the laws.
Notes
References
- Janssen, J. J. (1980). Absence from work by the necropolis workmen of Thebes. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, 8, 127–152.
- Pliny. (1952). Natural history, Volume IX: Books 33–35 (H. Rackham, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 394). Harvard University Press. (33.122)
- Roth, M. T. (1997). Law collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd ed.). Scholars Press.
- Vitruvius. (1934). On architecture, Volume II: Books 6–10 (F. Granger, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 280). Harvard University Press. (8.6.10–11)
