It is a fact of life that, for as long as people have been making laws, there have been people who have tried to break those laws and get away with it. Laws, of course, are extremely ancient; the oldest surviving formal, written law code is the Code of Ur-Nammu, which King Ur-Nammu of the Sumerian city-state of Ur promulgated around 2100 BCE. Humans have probably had informal laws for far longer. The obvious corollary to this is that crime is also very ancient—and, when the law becomes organized, criminal organizations tend to follow.
To modern readers, the phrase “organized crime” may conjure up images of recent historical gangsters like Al Capone or fictional criminals like Walter White from the AMC television series Breaking Bad, but various kinds of criminal organizations have existed in various civilizations since at least the Bronze Age. In this post, I will discuss examples from pharaonic Egypt, Classical Greece, and ancient Rome.
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