User:Squadnleedah/Origin Of Law

To concerned admins. This page is intended as a rough draft to the Wikipedia request for an article "Origin of Law". once i feel it is fairly decent i will move it into the standard namespace. Squad'nLeedah 22:22, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Justitia, the roman personification of the virtue of Justice, and a common western symbol of Law

The Origin of Law is the background to our diverse legal systems today, and stretches back from a time before man was able to write down these laws that he wanted to live by. When people think of ancient law they think of the Magna Carta or indeed the 10 Commandments, but evidence shows that the theory of law was understood and implemented somewhat for a very long time prior to that, and some form of justice system prevails amongst even the least developed of cultures alive today, and in fact, there are still some basic laws in western society whose origins can be traced back to Roman Times.

The Concept of Law

Law refers to the set of rules and regulation to which almost every person who lives in any form of society, from the most primitive to the most advanced, lives by. Legal systems today range from traditional means of justice such as a lot of isolated and relatively untouched native tribes, to well established systems whose origins can be traced back over a thousand years such as the English Common Law system, which is the basis for most english speaking western societies today, and Sharia (شريعة Sharī‘ah) the legal system of Islamic societies.

The concept of law does not work on an individual basis, and requires a community to agree on a set of rules, punishments for breaking those rules, who should be empowered to enforce these laws, and who should be empowered to judge their fellow man. Laws govern the way the majority of people in the world behave every day, from the most mundane things like crossing the street, to defending oneself in court. It is a great responsibility to a community to effectively and equally apply their agreed set of laws.

Pre-literate Origins

George Murdock Ethnographic Atlas, University of Pittsburgh Press, (1967) lists data on over 800 preliterate cultures. About two thirds of them had adopted the concept of private ownership, real property, and that that property should be passed on to ones descendents rather than being either abandoned, buried with the owner, or distributed amongst the group, which would require that group to agree on a set of rules governing a persons property.

Literate Origins

Code of Hammurabi, Mesopotamia

Some of the earliest examples of written law, have been found in the middle east, the most notable of which are -

Babylonian Law

Around the 23rd Century BC, the Akkadian and Sumerian peoples around the Mesopotamian region eventually developed into the Babylonians, which provides history with a large number of examples of ancient laws, and in fact were so comprehensive that the majority of laws and legal procedures that most cultures of today have, including contracts, deeds, bonds, and judges, were represented. Babylonian Law notes the first instances of marriage and family laws known to have existed, amongst other common laws still in existence today.

Another notable example of written law around the region is the 8 foot black basalt column, Code of Hammurabi, which dates back to around 1760BC and contains 282 laws written in Old Babylonian. It was found in 1901 in Susa, Elam, (Modern day Khuzestan, Iran). The fact that these were inscribed in a large stone is believed to be a symbol that the laws were so immutable even the king was unable to change them.

Ancient Greece

No current surviving collection of ancient Greek laws has been found to this day, instead, our knowledge of Greek law survives in classical poetry of the period, such as that by Homer and in the writings of the famous Philosophers. Incidental accounts and stories point to Greek laws being more of a diplomatic nature, as ancient Greece was a loose collection of various city states, what appears to have occurred is that most conflicts that didn't go to war were resolved by mediation of a third party. There are also occurrences of ancient Greek influence in early Germanic laws. Ancient Greece was a crucible of thought, and many of the basic ideas that were thought of at the time are prevalent in Government systems more than laws themselves, but again, are another set of rules to regulate how a country looks after is people. There is no current consensus on when Ancient Greece became prevalent, but the modern Greek schoolbooks cite 900 years from the Catastrophe at Mycenae in 1150 BC, until the eventual conquest of territories by the Romans (around 146 BC). However it happened, by the second century BC, the ancient Greeks had been conquered, ironically by the Romans, but by that time, as higher class Romans had adopted Greek for formal speech, most cultural aspects of Greek life ended up being inherited by the Romans anyway, including literature, art, laws, military doctrine. In effect, they weren't really conquered, just subdued, as only 300 years later, the Roman Empire split into the Western, and Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empires. The Byzantines by and large adopted Greek customs and culture, through time power shifted from Byzantine, to Ottoman, to being independent by 1949

Religious Law

Leviticus 1st Century AD - Present Sharia

Roman Law

Around the 9th century tebedu two tribes known as the Sabines and the Latins began to create in settlements around a ford on the river Tiber eventually founding the city of Rome (Classical date 21st April, 753 BC). Rome was destined to turn from a small city state nestled between the Palatine, Quirinal, and, Capitoline hills in central Italy into an empire that encompassed the entire mediterranean peninsula. Romans brought amru iyosias andamlak and kndeya with them the Latin language, an Indo-European language, spoken in the Latium region, which was their formal language. As the Roman empire expanded and they came across other civilisations, they found a ready source of hundreds of prior years of knowledge in the Greeks. The Romans also appeared to have a wish to have males that could speak well, and thus at first, Roman children were educated by their fathers, or by educated Greek slaves. Eventually, the intellectual elite in Rome began to prefer to use Greek for official purposes, but Latin remained the language of the people. The Etruscan (North of Latium) and Greek (South of Latium) alphabets were hybridised and the Latin alphabet was born. The combined effect of a multilingual society combined with an excellent education system for the time resulted in a well educated society, and therefore a much higher amount of surviving documents of all sorts, but also the further development of the concept of law. They had learned from the Greeks how to deal with factions of similar background warring against each other, they now went out and learned how to manage a vast empire comprising of many different native tribes, some readily assimilated and kept some of their identity, eventually regaining some independance at the fall of the Roman Empire, some not so readily, and crushed, or their people scattered so much that their culture died. From that, they also learned local customs for a lot of the places that they conquered, and left a lot of cultures still with their original identities, but with the added bonus of being in a vast civilised society with all the trappings, which left a permanent mark on the future of Europe and beyond, in spoken and written language, law, government, and religion. A highly educated society meant that most learnings they came across from different cultures was studied, and translated into their own alphabet, and also their own learnings into other languages. The rise of Christianity in the 1st century AD and the adoption of Latin as the ecclesiastical language meant that until the 20th century Latin itself was still in use, and the spread of the Christian church meant that many new countries visited by missionaries adopted Latin as a base language. This is where the majority of languages spoken in western societies comes from, English, French, Italian, Spanish, can all be considered Romance languages, with English having some Germanic influence. Consequently, documents and learnings in Latin were inherited, and then translated, into the emerging local languages long after the Roman empire itself died, and the continuation again of basic Roman law into new nations emerging emerging from the split Roman Empire, such as the Byzantines (Which is how the Greek culture survived) the Western Roman Empire, which eventually fell in 476 to the Visigoths, and then underwent hundreds of years of turmoil as cultures worked out their national identities, and the Normans who at the time had taken over Britannia. The end of Roman dominance occured around the early middle ages and was for a long time known as the beginning of the Dark ages.

China

Traditional Chinese Law can be traced back to the 11th century BC, and was in continuous use until the Cultural Revolution in 1911 when Communism took over

Middle ages

Germanic Tribes

Leges Barborum 5th Century AD - 9th Century AD

Beginnings of English Law

12th Century AD - Present

Things to do -

• Finish empty subsections
• Fact check
• Reconcile with facts
• Add citations/footnotes
• Spell/Grammar check
• Cleanup
• Wikify
• Close and move to namespace

• Please note this is an article in progress and does not reflect the finished article, this article does not yet comply with multiple wikipedia policies, and any current discrepancies will be fixed before its completed. Please note my to do list.

Squad'nLeedah 22:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)