Comment by bilbo0s
The deaths of masons and builders. All the way back to Hammurabi.
BTW, Hammurabi was particularly dastardly in his building code specifications. You could, of course, be put to death if a building or wall collapsed and killed someone. But that was just table stakes. Even Ur-Nammu had that much figured out.
Hammurabi added on to the punishment by forcing you to rebuild the wall..
to the specifications of reputable builders..
at your own expense..
and then be put to death.
Don't even get me started on Asian "building codes" back in the day.
HN user Arainach is right, no one was guessing, or intuiting, while building in a lot of these empires. It was wayyy too risky. Pretty much everyone was following rules passed down by the builders for centuries. In some cases, millennia. Only an actual ruler would dare even consider deviating from the known good building forms.
Life was worth a lot less back then. If they were putting people to death over every construction accident that claimed a life nothing would've got built. And back then they weren't building skyscrapers and suspension bridges where one key joint fails and the rest falls over with no warning. They were building simple fairly short structures that can only really kill you if the roof hits you on its way down and gave a whole lot of warning before that happened. Castles and cathedrals and city walls and the like don't fall down unless you intentionally ignore or obfuscate a ton of cracking a slumping and things moving, etc, etc. The people who'd have faced consequences like specified in these code are people who've actually done malicious things.