Many years ago, I found myself on a school trip to the now long-departed but not much lamented Soviet Union. Eager to further the cause of a history project I took advantage of some permitted shopping time in the state-owned GUM department store to purchase, for a remarkably small sum, an English translation of the 1936 Soviet constitution. For those unfamiliar with it, this was an astonishingly benevolent document guaranteeing universal suffrage, secret ballot and so forth. Even as a schoolboy, a moment's reflection that this was a constitution written by a committee headed by Joseph Stalin was enough to convince me that, sometimes, very little of the way that a society actually works can be captured by the study of its written laws or of the principles that purport to govern it. This was not a profound insight, but somehow in the world there still exists a very real belief in the innate power of words written down and, in particular, in the intangible power and authority expressed by written law. Perhaps this is an echo of our past.

The very first written laws were inscribed on stele, topped by the images of the gods. In truth we do not know if any of the early Sumerian and Akkadian law codes were ever actually enforced, but the message of the iconography was pretty clear – law had been given by the gods to the kings and was a sign of divine authority and therefore upheld by more than mere temporal sanction. Furthermore, to write something down was to bring it from one world into another. Whether it be the words inscribed upon stele, pierced into the clay of the omen texts, or much later scrawled upon the parchment of medieval prayers, curses and spells, for four millennia humanity has been seized by the sense that to write something down is in some is in some measure to actualise it, to give it a potency both in this world and that of the gods.