The Aramaic Legal Tradition: customary law reflected in contracts and other documents

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The heyday of Aramaic extended from the period of the Assyrian Empire to early Islamic times (when Aramaic began to be supplanted by Arabic). As the lingua franca of much of the Middle East it was the main language of commerce and law. Until relatively recently the only corpus of legal documents in Aramaic (real estate and slave sale contracts, mortgage documents, etc.) was from Persian-ruled Egypt of the fifth century BCE. On the basis of these Egyptian documents Y. Muffs in his Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine (1963) was able to situate the Aramaic legal formulary and praxis in the context of other ancient Near Eastern legal traditions (Egypt and Mesopotamia). Newly published discoveries have not overturned his conclusions, but they have extended the database so much that a complete re-evaluation has become necessary. They extend the evidence of the Aramaic legal tradition from the seventh century BCE to the third CE. These newer documentary materials are as follows:(1) Seventh century BCE clay tablets bearing Aramaic texts, often attached as summaries to cuneiform documents. (2) The fourth century BCE Samaria papyri, mostly slave sales and real estate conveyances. (3) The first/second century CE 'Cave of Letters' documents and related Judaean Desert texts (two sub-categories, the Jewish Aramaic legal texts and the Nabataean Aramaic legal texts: the Nabataean materials provide us with the first extensive documentary evidence of Nabataean law).(4) The third century CE Syriac legal parchments (one a slave sale, the others connected with mortgages and loans). All previous studies of the legal tradition either ignore later developments (after Elephantine) or were published before the newer texts came to light. The present project seeks to analyse the individual documents of the corpora listed above in terms of genres (real estate and slave sales, for example) and their formularies (subjective v. objective language, for example), their different protective strategies (appeals, etc.) and their contexts of legal praxis (including physical arrangements for witnessing, sealing, etc.). Comparisons with cuneiform and to some extent Egyptian law, and with Greek and Roman law are needed to elucidate the level of indebtedness of these Aramaic texts to the major legal traditions of the Near East. This comparison is ultimately focussed on an attempt to establish on a clear basis the characteristics of the Aramaic legal tradition. The overall research question is whether Aramaic law was simply a secondary offshoot from cuneiform law which in due course underwent Hellenization and Romanization, or whether it can be understood as independent (even if influenced by outside forces).