The choice of the term “great society” here derives from McNeill’s text, which describes this society of the Mesopotamian King Hammurabi (1795 – 1750 B.C.E.) as one where there was a “comparatively wide dispersion of effective decision-making” among palace officials, merchants and the army. (58) No one segment dominates, although priestly caste and royal household remain at the top of the diagram. The priest holds one arm skyward while the other points downward, to suggest the link the priest plays between the mundane world and the cosmos. The hourglass next to him emphasizes the priest's role as a keeper of technical knowledge, as was necessary to manage the irrigation systems. The god sits atop the diagram, seated, as was the artistic convention in many Near Eastern societies. The god holds a bolt in his left hand, suggesting that his relationship to humanity below is vengeful and capricious, ever ready to smite. The symbol for law stands for divine law, that sovereignty is granted by the gods. Hammurabi himself did not claim divine status, only that his power derived from the gods, which may explain why there is no symbol for Hammurabi himself in this diagram. The peasant toils at bottom; his fields are gridded, a representation of the Mesopotamian use of higher mathematics and centralized control over the distribution of land. The products of peasant labor contribute to the surplus that maintains both the temple complex, the royal bureaucracy and the artisan and merchant classes. The symbol for the army, who are housed perhaps in a palace structure, represents the increasing bureaucratization of the royal household, a change under Hammurabi. The merchant facilitates local trade, although from a position below the palace officials , who oversee foreign trade (note the pyramids in the background, suggesting trade over land with Egypt).