The Beginnings of Law, Gebunden

Klappentext

In legal history, the ancient Near East - including ancient Israel - has often been relegated to isolated and marginal positions. Scholarship has long been dominated by narratives that privilege Greece and Rome as the foundations of Western law, and the legal traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel are frequently treated as historical curiosities rather than as integral contributors to the development of legal thought. Yet recent research across multiple disciplines urges a reappraisal: the ancient Mediterranean, particularly its eastern regions, should be understood as a fluid cultural sphere, where legal, social, and religious ideas circulated widely. This volume emerges from a conference dedicated to exploring various facets of pre-Roman legal history. By examining Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and ancient Israelite legal traditions in comparative and contrastive perspectives, the contributions reveal the role of these cultures in shaping legal concepts and show how these legal ideas left traces beyond their original contexts. These findings show law to be a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, intertwined with ethics, religion, politics, and social practice. Bringing together leading scholars from diverse fields, this volume offers fresh perspectives on ancient law and its societal functions, demonstrating the enduring value of studying legal systems outside classical paradigms. It invites readers to rethink not only the history of law but also the conceptual frameworks through which law itself is understood.