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Loading... Ex Oriente Lex: Near Eastern Influences on Ancient Greek and Roman Lawby Raymond Westbrook
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Throughout the twelve essays that appear in Ex Oriente Lex, Raymond Westbrook convincingly argues that the influence of Mesopotamian legal traditions and thought did not stop at the shores of the Mediterranean, but rather had a profound impact on the early laws and legal developments of Greece and Rome as well. He presents readers with tantalizing fragments of early Greek or archaic Roman law which, when placed in the context of the broader Near Eastern tradition, suddenly acquire unexpected new meanings. Before his untimely death in July 2009, Westbrook was regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on ancient legal history. Although his main field was ancient Near Eastern law, he also made important contributions to the study of early Greek and Roman law. In his examination of the relationship between ancient Near Eastern and pre-classical Greek and Roman law, Westbrook sought to demonstrate that the connection between the two legal spheres was not merely theoretical but also concrete. The Near Eastern legal heritage had practical consequences that help us understand puzzling individual cases in the Greek and Roman traditions. His essays provide rich material for further reflection and interdisciplinary discussion about compelling similarities between legal cultures and the continuity of legal traditions over several millennia. Aimed at classicists and ancient historians, as well as biblicists, Egyptologists, Assyriologists, and legal historians, this volume gathers many of Westbrook's most important essays on the legal aspects of Near Eastern cultural influences on the Greco-Roman world, including one new, never-before-published piece. A preface by editors Deborah Lyons and Kurt Raaflaub details the importance of Westbrook's work for the field of classics, while Sophie Démare-Lafont's incisive introduction places Westbrook's ideas within the wider context of ancient law. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)340.538Social sciences Law Law Legal Systems Ancient Law Ancient Greek LawLC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
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Wikipedia in English
Westbrook’s central thesis can be expressed as follows: there existed in the Ancient Near East (ANE) a common legal tradition, beginning as early as the third millennium BC and continuing until the first, which influenced the early laws of Greece and Rome. Westbrook believed that Mesopotamian legal codes were a single genre of jurisprudence, not legislative in nature but constituting collections of earlier royal judgments from which general legal principles were distilled, over an extended period, in order to flesh out the theory surrounding the practice of law. In this way a comprehensive legal system based on precedent was built up and then communicated to future jurists. Westbrook saw evidence for this common tradition in the recurrence of the same or similar rules in disparate legal systems and in discussions of similar legal problems found in the various extant law codes of the ANE.
Based on apparent commonalities in the law codes of Greece and Rome and those of the ANE, Westbrook reasoned that the different systems all developed from a single shared source that could only be the scribal schools of Mesopotamia. Transmission between the thinkers of early Rome and the intellectual tradition of the ANE was mediated by the Phoenicians as “direct bearers of ancient Near Eastern culture” (p. 87). So it was not law that the Greeks and Romans borrowed from Mesopotamia but the legal and intellectual skills needed to create law.
Needless to say, Westbrook’s thesis remains heterodox and controversial and not simply because of what the editors call “the all-too-common failing of classicists, the tendency to imagine the culture of Greece as springing full-blown as if from the head of Zeus, acknowledging no other parentage”, a failing that led to a “violent – almost literally so” reaction to Westbrook’s first unveiling of his work on the Twelve Tables (p.x). Those familiar with the Westbrook hypothesis will have wished that Westbrook had had the opportunity to compile a monograph in which his theories could be laid out at length and in detail. That was not to be, and this collection must suffice to fill the gap.