Legal Documents of the Hellenistic World

This volume contains the papers given in seminars between 28 February and 16 May 1986 in London. Scholars with an interest in legal history, but working in different areas of the Ancient World - Egypt, Babylonia, Palestine, the Greek East - were invited to look at the way on which the various legal systems interacted, or reacted against one another, once Alexander had imposed Greek law on the countries he had conquered. Since only a few fragments of the actual laws survive, a reconstruction of the different legal systems has to rely to a large extent on the documents which these systems produced. For this reason it seemed best to concentrate on the documents themselves, looking at them from a comparative point of view, in order to discover how the legal texts of the Hellenistic period, written in Greek, Egyptian (Demotic), Akkadian and Aramaic, deal with land-ownership, family law, testaments, temple law, laws of obligations, and the legal position of slaves. How would a man or a woman in Egypt or Babylonia of the period buy or sell land, take out a mortgage or a loan, marry or get divorced, or write a will? For the convenience of readers, and to make consulation of the original source material easier, the relevant documents are presented after each paper, both in their original languages and in translation. In all, seven seminars took place at the Institute of Classical Studies, followed by a one-day evaluative conference at the Warburg Institute. Meetings were chaired by Professor Joseph Meleze-Modrzehewski (Paris iv-Sorbonne) who also gave the opening summary of the etat de la question and the scope for interdisciplinary research.