This chapter seeks to understand ‘legal science’ from the internal point of view of each tradition and society, in order to avoid a conception too heavily influenced by contemporary views. To do so, reference is made both to the set of activities carried out by ‘legal experts’ in the whole domain of law (legislation, adjudication, legal counseling and education), and to the legal experts themselves, as far as they were regarded as such by their own societies. This approach requires first to establish the extent to which, in each society under consideration, knowledge of law was considered as autonomous knowledge. A sociological perspective is then adopted, identifying who in each society were considered legal experts, i.e. persons deemed to possess the legal knowledge to such a degree that it characterized their social position and/or function. The chapter then proceeds in a progressively more content-oriented manner towards a comparative description of legal science, focusing on how legal training took place in each society under consideration and in what literary forms the legal experts expressed themselves, to finally arrive at the core question, namely the description of the respective forms of legal reasoning.

This chapter examines the kinds of legal procedure adopted by various ancient legal systems to conduct legal proceedings in a court. The areas covered include the constitution of courts, preliminary court proceedings, valid evidence, presentation and evaluation of evidence, and the final verdict, including the possibility of appeals. Discussions include judges and court personnel, the physical space of courts, distinctions between civil and criminal cases, plaint and plea, sureties, and legal representation. Under evidence there is examination of witnesses, documents, oaths, ordeals, torture for evidentiary purposes, and forensic investigation, and punishment for perjury. Once a verdict is reached by the court, there are issues relating to the recording and the enforcement of the verdict. There is wide diversity in the legal procedure recorded in the sources from different legal traditions. Some deal with the topic explicitly, while in others we have to deduce the procedure from material on court cases.

In most ancient cultures, what we now call religion was interwoven throughout all aspects of life and did not always form a discrete cultural domain. Nevertheless, its principal symbols and traditions can be sufficiently distinguished to allow for a fruitful examination of the relationship of law and religion in antiquity. This chapter pursues that endeavour, with particular attention to instances when the sources at our disposal indicate, explicitly or implicitly, that law was relying on religious ideas to achieve legal ends. The chapter considers the role of religion in legitimizing law, in public law and governance, in legal transactions and proceedings, and in the determination and punishment of wrongdoing. It ultimately seeks to add clarity and specificity to the scholarly description of how law and religion interacted in the ancient world.

This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

Chapter 12 concludes the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law by drawing out a set of fundamental comparisons, both differences and similarities, from the volume’s previous chapters, in addition to offering further reflections on the field of ‘ancient law’ itself. The chapter opens by comparing and contrasting the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law to earlier historiography, underscoring its unique contribution to existing scholarship: developed through collaborative work and drawing upon numerous specialist traditions and technical expertise, across a pan-Eurasian research field. The chapter then moves on to a broader discussion of ‘Mapping the Ancient Legal Cosmos’ and ‘Ordering Ancient Associations’, pinpointing the specific connections between ethics, law and statecraft that can be observed across the ancient source material. The chapter concludes by suggesting several answers to a provocative, but fundamental, question: What is ‘Ancient’ about ‘Ancient Law’?.

Caroline Humfress explores the distinctive relationship between sacred (Christian) temporality and (Western) ‘hermeneutics of the state’, through a focus upon the founding texts of the Civilian legal tradition: the sixth-century CE Digest, Code and Institutes. Part 1 analyses the Emperor Justinian’s claim that these law-books were to be ‘valid for all eternity’ through a series of close textual readings of the same law-books’ prefatory constitutions. Part 2 contextualises Justinian’s lawyerly invocation of ‘eternity’ within contemporary Eastern Christological disputes, including a set of theological debates, orchestrated by Justinian himself, that took place at the same time (and location) as his law-books were being compiled. Part 3 concludes by arguing that the ‘timeless’, rational, universal, authority of the Civilian Legal tradition – as explored in the chapter by Ryan – was in fact underpinned by a specific Eastern (‘Byzantine’) sacred temporality.