Writing Laws in Antiquity.

• Author: Morrow, William S.

Writing Laws in Antiquity. Edited by DOMINIQUE JAILLARD and CHRISTOPHE NIHAN. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 19. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2017. Pp. 170. [euro]58.

This slim volume publishes seven essays based on papers presented at a conference held at the University of Lausanne in 2011. The conference theme is a better guide to its contents than the book's present title as five of the seven contributions are directly dedicated to topics connected to "Codes de lois et lois sacrees: La redaction et la codification des lois en Grece et dans l'lsrael ancien." However, the other two essays obliquely indicate programmatic interests that connect all of these papers.

Sophie Demare-Lafont discusses the usefulness of the term "codification" in connection with cuneiform law, while Sandra L. Lippert sets out evidence for the codification of laws in Egypt during the Persian period. Although Demare-Lafont notes anachronistic implications in applying the term "law code" to cuneiform collections, she describes various features that point to scribal interests in the extension and abstraction of legal principles. Lippert, for her part, sets out evidence for the purposeful collection of legal lore in Egypt beginning in the 19th dynasty and coming to some kind of normative status by the time of Darius I.

While the metaphor of "system" does not occur in any of these essays, it may underscore what is at stake in all of them, for the metaphor is operative on at least two levels. First, there are questions regarding how writing may have contributed to the articulation of ancient legal systems; second, there are questions as to how these written collections reflect the social systems in which they were composed and transmitted. These issues are dealt with in two separate sections of the book.

The first consists of four essays surveying the literatures of ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Israel, and Egypt from the perspective of "Codes, Codification and Legislators." Besides the essays of Demare-Lafont and Lippert, included are a study by Franijoise Ruze on "La codification en Grece archai'que" and one by Gary N. Knoppers on "Moses and the Greek Lawgivers." As Ruze restricts her purview to early written law in Greece (underscoring its ad hoc nature), only Knoppers really embraces the comparative task. His study notes some interesting and neglected parallels between the depiction of...