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What can we learn about the world of an ancient empire from the ways that people complain when they feel that they have been violated? What role did law play in people's lives? And what did they expect their government to do for them when they felt harmed and helpless? If ancient historians have frequently written about nonelite people as if they were undifferentiated and interchangeable, Ari Z. Bryen counters by drawing on one of our few sources of personal narratives from the Roman world: over a hundred papyrus petitions, submitted to local and imperial officials, in which individuals from the Egyptian countryside sought redress for acts of violence committed against them. By assembling th...
Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity is the first book to examine what early Jewish courtroom narratives can tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice. Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Chaya T. Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in the ancient Jewish tradition.
Highly respected New Testament scholar Craig Keener is known for his meticulous and comprehensive research. This commentary on Acts, his magnum opus, may be the largest and most thoroughly documented Acts commentary available. Useful not only for the study of Acts but also early Christianity, this work sets Acts in its first-century context. In this volume, the first of four, Keener introduces the book of Acts, particularly historical questions related to it, and provides detailed exegesis of its opening chapters. He utilizes an unparalleled range of ancient sources and offers a wealth of fresh insights. This magisterial commentary will be a valuable resource for New Testament professors and students, pastors, Acts scholars, and libraries.
Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossolalia were used as technologies of power. Laura Nasrallah's study reframes the field of religion, the study of the Roman imperial period, and the investigation of the New Testament and ancient Christianity. Her approach eschews disciplinary aesthetics that privilege the literature and archaeological remains of elites, and that defines curses as magical materials, separable from religious ritual. Moreover, Nasrallah's imaginative use of art and 'research creations' of contemporary Black painters, sculptors, and poets offer insights for understanding how ancient ritual materials embedded into art work intervene into the present moment and critique injustice.
No extant text gives so vivid a glimpse into the experience of an ancient prisoner as Paul's letter to the Philippians. As a letter from prison, however, it is not what one would expect. For although it is true that Paul, like some other ancient prisoners, speaks in Philippians of his yearning for death, what he expresses most conspicuously is contentment and even joy. Setting aside pious banalities that contrast true joy with happiness, and leaving behind too heroic depictions that take their cue from Acts, Abject Joy offers a reading of Paul's letter as both a means and an artifact of his provisional attempt to make do. By outlining the uses of punitive custody in the administration of Rom...
In an expansion of his 2012 Robson Classical Lectures, Clifford Ando examines the connection between the nature of the Latin language and Roman thinking about law, society, and empire. Drawing on innovative work in cognitive linguistics and anthropology, Roman Social Imaginaries considers how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation helped create the structures of thought that shaped the Roman Empire as a political construct. Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latin's extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire. Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today's most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.
Imperial and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century CE explores the significance of Roman citizenship in the long century before Caracalla's universal grant of citizenship in 212 CE. From this emerges a new portrait of the early Roman empire: an exclusive regime of citizenship persisted, in a context of remarkable political and cultural integration.
The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law is the first of its kind in the field of comparative ancient legal history. Written collaboratively by a dedicated team of international experts, each chapter offers a new framing and understanding of key legal concepts, practices and historical contexts across five major legal traditions of the ancient world. Stretching chronologically across more than three and a half millennia, from the earliest, very fragmentary, proto-cuneiform tablets (3200–3000 BCE) to the Tang Code of 652 CE, the volume challenges earlier comparative histories of ancient law / societies, at the same time as opening up new areas for future scholarship across a wealth of surviving ancient Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Greek and Roman primary source evidence. Topics covered include 'law as text', legal science, inter-polity relations, law and the state, law and religion, legal procedure, personal status and the family, crime, property and contract.
This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international rel...
The study of ancient law has blossomed in recent years. In English alone there have been dozens of studies devoted to classical Greek and Roman law, to the Roman legal codes, and to the legal traditions of the ancient Near East among many other topics. Legal documents written on papyrus began to be published in some abundance by the end of the nineteenth century; but even after substantial publication history, legal papyri have not received due attention from legal historians. This book blends the two usually distinct juristic scholarly traditions, classical and Egyptological, into a coherent presentation of the legal documents from Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the late Byzantine periods, all translated and accompanied by expert commentary. The volume will serve as an introduction to the rich legal sources from Egypt in the later phases of its ancient history as well as a tool to compare legal documents from other cultures.