The Golden Rule got its English name from two Anglicans in 1604
Treating others as you would want to be treated is found in nearly every ethical tradition, from Egyptian papyri to Confucius to the Torah. Yet the label itself is surprisingly recent. Its earliest known use comes from Charles Gibbon and Thomas Jackson in 1604, and British preachers spread it through the 17th century.
The rule comes in flavours. The positive form tells you to treat others as you would like to be treated; the negative form, sometimes called the Silver Rule, tells you not to do to others what you would hate done to yourself. The negative version is often the older. A papyrus from Egypt's Late Period, roughly 664 to 323 BCE, already warns against doing to another what you hate having done to you, and the earlier Middle Kingdom tale of the Eloquent Peasant expresses a reciprocity rooted in the goddess Ma'at.
In China, Confucius, who lived around 551 to 479 BCE, offered what may be the earliest prohibitive version; it asks only that you avoid harm, without presuming to act on others' behalf. Mozi treated reciprocity as a consequence of impartiality and imagined that if everyone valued other states and families as their own, nobody would launch attacks. In India the Mahābhārata, dated between 400 BCE and 400 CE, calls the principle the whole of dharma, and the Tamil poet Valluvar advised shaming wrongdoers with kindness.
Greek thinkers voiced it too. Thales urged people to avoid doing what they would blame in others, and Isocrates, living from 436 to 338 BCE, gave a close variant. The Stoic Seneca produced a hierarchical twist in a letter on the treatment of slaves: behave toward inferiors as you would want superiors to behave toward you. Zoroastrian Pahlavi texts contain similar lines.
In Leviticus the command appears as loving your neighbour as yourself, alongside a ban on revenge and grudges. John J. Collins notes most scholars read it as applying to fellow Israelites, with Richard Elliott Friedman a prominent dissenter. Hillel the Elder, challenged by a gentile to explain the Torah while standing on one foot, answered that it came down to not doing to your fellow what is hateful to you, with everything else commentary.
Source: Golden Rule
