This chapter describes the law collections from the region such as the Laws of Hammurabi and the other types of extant legal documents such as contracts and trial records. It also explains how this evidence helps us understand the historical context of biblical law and how comparative analysis contributes to its study.

This chapter introduces slavery during the three centuries of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt for which papyri, recycled in mummy casing or discovered archived together, provide a wealth of texts in both Greek and Egyptian Demotic. Greek settlers brought a developed form of slavery to Egypt. Traditional forms of dependence, however, continued in domestic as in temple contexts, where sacred slaves were dedicated to a god. The terminology of slavery is scrutinised and Greek city law codes examined for information on slaves. The third-century BC archive of Zenon provides many details on where slaves came from and how they were acquired. Slaves are mainly found in a domestic context but there is some evidence for workshop employment, especially in textiles; evidence for their use in agriculture is minimal. To gain their freedom slaves might benefit from testamentary grants but running away was the more usual method.

Excerpts from the Laws written in, or translated from English into Latin in the early twelfth century provide insight into the legal language of the period as well as the current laws affecting the king and his population.

The Spanish judiciary thrived on complexity. Judges in the Americas worked within multiple court systems with interwoven jurisdictions and could consult seven different overlapping law codes when considering their decisions. This chapter covers the relevant judicial institutions in the context of the late eighteenth century.

Chapter 3 argues that a particularly powerful ‘legitimising notion’ was that people’s rights, status, and even their ownership of property, derive from the remote past, even if this was often an imagined past. Anglo-Saxon conquest narratives played a very important part in forming an ‘imagined community’, a people’s sense of their common identity, invoked particularly when the country was under threat. The narrative of Gildas’ ‘Downfall of Britain’ recurs throughout the book as legitimising the association of freedom, land, and public obligation.