Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, Dominique Charpin focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers considerable insight into how writing and the law evolved together to forge the principles of authority, precedent, and documentation that dominate us to this day. As legal codes throughout the region evolved through advances in cuneiform writing, kings and governments were able to stabilize their control over distant realms and impose a common language—which gave rise to complex social systems overseen by magistrates, judges, and scribes that eventually became the vast empires of history books. Sure to attract any reader with an interest in the ancient Near East, as well as rhetoric, legal history, and classical studies, this book is an innovative account of the intertwined histories of law and language.
Dominique Charpin is directeur d’études, section des Sciences historiques et philologiques, École pratique des hautes études at the University of Paris. He is the author of Lire et Ecrire à Babyloné, most recently, among several other books. Jane Marie Todd is the translator of numerous books for the University of Chicago Press.