Ancient law (excluding Roman law)   Tags: ancient egypt, ancient greece, babylonian law, cuneiform law, electronic legal resources, hammurabi, hittite law, jewish law, legal resources  

Click on the link to download a Word version of the ancient law guide suitable for printing.

Welcome to the Bodleian Law Library's guide to ancient law resources.  

The guide covers the laws of ancient civilistaions situated in the geographical area around the eastern Mediterranean- the ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek and Jewish societies which flourished during the first four millenniums BCE and were responsible for the very earliest recorded law.  See separate guides for Roman law and Anglo-American legal history.

Use the tabs at the top to navigate through the sections of the guide.  Ancient societies are not always easily geographically or chronologically definable though, and so bear in mind that there is a lot of crossover in the usefulness of the resources mentioned.

The nature of ancient law re

Primary sources
The development of writing from the 3rd millennium BCE and the development of law and administration go hand in hand.  Writing systems allowed ancient laws to be officially collated, recorded and enforced in a way that just wasn't possible with fluctuating oral traditions.  Surviving written records, including the often monumental inscriptions yielded by archaeological sites, provide primary evidence for the nature of ancient law.  Of course only records which have survived the few thousand years since their creation are available to us, and so primary sources can be restricted or misguiding in what they tell us. 

Secondary sources
Commentaries and investigations tackle ancient law from a range of perspectives: from the characteristics and functioning of particular legal systems, to sociological/anthropological studies of ancient law in the context of the evolution of law and complex civilisations.  Useful sources often come from within disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology and ancient history, as well as law itself.