The Beginnings of Law. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Legal History in Pre-Roman Times

In the field of legal history, the ancient Near East and, along with it, ancient Israel occupy unique and often isolated conceptual niches. Given the primacy of Greece and especially Rome as the assumed progenitors of the Western cultural and legal tradition, the legal cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel usually play ancillary roles in the history of law. They are notable curiosities of extreme antiquity, but they do not quite fit the historical meta-narratives constructed by and for the Western world.
 
Beginning from recent insights in various fields of research, the ancient Mediterranean – in particular, the eastern Mediterranean – should be understood as one continuous cultural sphere with fluid rather than rigid boundaries. The conference aims to explore how and why the ancient Near East should be included in every serious discussion about the history of law and especially discussions about ancient law – not least because ANE legal traditions had a major impact on Western legal tradition through biblical texts and ecclesiastical agency.
 
The heuristic value in including these cultures in broader analyses of legal history is that they challenge entrenched assumptions about the nature of law. Through a variety of comparative and contrastive approaches, the results of this conference will invite scholars to rethink epistemologies derived from Greek or Roman traditions and help to develop new perspectives not only on ancient law, but also on the perception of the phenomenon of law itself.
 
This conference will help demonstrate that law is a complex phenomenon with many overlaps, exchanges, and interactions with neighboring social spheres like ethics, religion, and politics – to name just a few. The discussions will enhance our understanding of the role that law plays in influencing societies and social discourses. Bringing together scholars from all relevant fields of research, this undertaking will broaden and deepen the knowledge about ancient law, and enable Western scholars to engage with legal cultures that are conceptually autonomous from Western legal conceptions to overcome the blind spots in each area of expertise.
 

Program

Organising Comittee
Anna Angelini
Peter Altmann
Matthias Hopf
Dylan Johnson
Lida Panov
Konrad Schmid

Information and Registration:
Diana Haibucher, diana.haibucher@uzh.ch
The conference is open to the public.
Fee for participating in the lunch: 25.- CHF