The late ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine (ca. 2nd–5th centuries ce) are properly included in a history of rights despite the absence from their literatures of a discrete term for “rights.” Nearly a century ago, Dr. Isaac Herzog introduced “rights” as among the “fundamental concepts” requiring examination early in the first volume of his The Main Institutions of Jewish Law, which surveys and analyzes Jewish law sources from the rabbinic period through early modernity. Herzog observes that “‘Right’ and its correlative ‘duty’ are fundamental concepts in law” without which “law would be unthinkable.” He draws inter alia on John Salmond in defining a “right” as “an interest recognised and protected by a rule of right” and “any interest respect for which is a duty and the disregard of which is a wrong.” By way of illustration, Herzog observes that if A owes money to B, then B has a right against A to recover the debt. Herzog proclaims it “self-evident” that “these elemental concepts are present in Jewish law” while observing that the “ancient sources” lack terms corresponding to English law’s “right” and “duty.”

It is common to read that the concept of rights did not exist in ancient times. The most influential proponent of this thesis in the past half-century or so may be Alasdair MacIntyre but he is hardly alone. In a more recent discussion, Tom Campbell says this: “Rights (as distinct from the more general ideas of right and wrong) were unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, although the idea developed in the course of medieval theorizing concerning Roman law.” A slightly more nuanced view is put forward by William Sweet: “The history of the ‘discourse’ of human rights is fairly well known. While the existence of ‘natural rights’ is implied in works of antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that we begin to see an acknowledgment of rights as distinct from ‘the right.’”

In terms of social and legal history, Ptolemaic Egypt is the best known of the Hellenistic kingdoms, as the dry sand conserved an abundance of papyri for centuries. Its multi-ethnic population and the combination of ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Greek cultural elements make it an even more interesting case study. A direct equivalent to the modern concept of rights probably did not exist in Ptolemaic Egypt, even if there is discussion around the terms used. Aspects of the concept of rights can be traced at different levels of intensity. Rights and duties in the sense of obligation deriving either from contract or violations of other persons or their belongings are found in hundreds of contracts, petitions, claims, or court proceedings in Greek as well as in Egyptian contexts. Beyond this two-person relationship, more abstract rights over things and persons are found relative to property, paternal authority, or slavery, which are all sometimes categorized as absolute rights today. On the other hand, to assume rights in the sense of liberties of an individual against the state or of legal power within the state is probably anachronistic.

The concept of rights as the bedrock of legal systems arose in modernity. This fact derives from a variety of contingent circumstances, some historical, others epistemological. Yet the building blocks from which the edifice of rights discourse is constructed were assembled and shaped in premodernity. The oldest strata in the quarry from which legal rights derive is surely classical, insights and postulates explored first by the Greeks beginning in the fifth century bce and incorporated into legal praxis through Roman law, particularly in the high imperial centuries. They were then kept alive and further developed in the late Middle Ages when the twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators and in turn the fourteenth-century nominalist William of Ockham first articulated most of the principles out of which the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics, seventeenth-century humanists, and eighteenth-century social contract theorists would develop full-fledged elaborations of rights-based law.

The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study while clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, Volume i of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.

Is there anything in the ancient world that deserves to be called a “right” in the subjective sense? The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stated quite apodictically that “there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400,” concluding from this that even if there were such rights, “no one could have known that there were.” Until relatively recently, historians would have agreed with MacIntyre. The prevailing view was that in antiquity we look in vain for what has come to be called subjective rights – that neither the concept of rights nor the word “right” could be encountered in the ancient world in its subjective sense.

The Hebrew Bible with its strident championing of the oppressed is frequently associated with the development of human rights. Renowned for its bold account of the emancipation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, its impact on the later beliefs in freedom and human dignity is immense. Yet is it appropriate to associate its laws with the origin of this principle, since the term itself (זכויות אדם in Hebrew) is absent in the Pentateuch – and where it is anachronistic to impose this post-Enlightenment concept on these ancient sources?

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.