The concept of human rights spread quickly from Babylon to India, Greece, and, eventually, Rome. In response to the observation that people tended to follow certain unwritten laws in the course of life, the concept of "natural law" arose, and Roman law was based on rational ideas derived from the nature of things.
Individual rights-affirming documents such as the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), the US Constitution (1787), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the US Bill of Rights (1791) are the written forerunners to many of today's human rights documents.