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.

Chapter 11 focuses on ancient ‘contracts’, with specific reference to commerce, property and other economic activities for which there is relevant evidence. The chapter begins with urbanization in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce, bringing together archaeological, material and written evidence in order to introduce a broad working idea of ‘contracts’. The next section moves on to a discussion of technical ancient terms and concepts, noting the ‘considerable terminological instability in the common English translations of the original terms’. The following section turns to ‘contracts’ between states, whilst the next develops a comparative analysis of ‘oaths in interpersonal agreements’. The following two sections analyse specific questions surrounding the use of writing and ’the contract of sale’, noting that there is surviving evidence for the use of (different forms of) contacts of sale across every ancient legal system. The chapter concludes by drawing together a set of generalized conceptions of ‘contract’ and briefly suggesting that long-distance trade - among other factors - may lie behind some of the similarities - for example the use of seals - evident across the extant ancient evidence.

Chapter 1 provides essential orientation for the rest of the volume’s contents. It begins by introducing some key issues including recent attempts to define ‘law’ and the challenges of undertaking a comparative history of ancient law (past and present). The next section moves on to introducing the different types of source material covered in the volume, introducing seven ‘rough categories’ of evidence: normative texts; commentaries; documentary records; ‘reports’ or ‘records’ of ‘cases’; portrayals of legal processes, and model forensic speeches; ritual forms; and ‘law’ in other forms of text. The final part of the chapter gives an overview of the major features and specific historical contexts for the principal legal traditions, intended as both introduction and information to be referred back to when consulting the volume as a whole.

Chapter 10 surveys the history, the concepts and the institutions of property in premodern India, China, the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Formal rules of ownership and inheritance formed the basis of all premodern legal regimes and undergirded economic performance (for instance, growth), as has been frequently stressed by New Institutional Economists. The enforcement of property rights reveals a good deal about the diverse economies, environments and cultures of premodern societies. The chapter summarizes the sources for property rights, which are rich and varied; and the control and use of resources occupy a considerable part of private legal documentation in all premodern systems that have yielded written material.

In this chapter we treat law as inextricably connected to a text. We examine the ways in which laws and other elements of the legal process, including documents, procedural records, and judicial opinions and commentaries, are produced, preserved, transmitted and communicated to various audiences in ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Near East and Egypt, ancient India and ancient China. We include discussions of when and how texts first emerged in these societies, the materials on which they were written and preserved, and other special features of their written texts, such as language, syntax, degree of precision, and organization and codification. We also examine these aspects of secondary legal texts, including historical accounts and reports, literature, philosophical, religious and other intellectual works, non-legal documents, instructional materials and visual ‘texts’, to see how these contributed to the understanding of law as text.

Modern legal systems generally have a category of obligations known variously as restitution, unjust enrichment, unjustified enrichment or some variant of these. Whichever legal system they are found in, they have a common source in Roman law: the stoic idea that enrichment at the expense of another is unjust, obligations quasi ex contractu and the different forms of non-contractual condictiones. This chapter traces the development of the ideas from Justinian to the modern day, picking up ideas of equity along the way. It focuses on the shifting principles underlying the category, typified by its name, rather than its concrete instantiations, aiming to trace the largely unthinking patterns of borrowing from one legal system to another and from one language to another.