But unless I've misunderstood Graeber, the idea entered modern jurisprudence and took its recogniseable form from the Roman Empire. In other words, it either looked considerably different in civilisations like Babylon and Tenochtitian, or there's a historic gap of weaker property enforcement between those civilisations and ours.
Likewise in pre-Columbian Mexico, as per the Florentine Codex:
“It was a crime to light a fire in the woods without permission, to cut down trees, to move boundary-markers, to take game from another man’s hunting trap and to steal crops from the fields. All these were crimes that could be punished by death.”
