Continuity of Nabataean law in the Petra papyri: A methodological exercise

Hannah M. Cotton*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

What do we know of Nabataean law? Or, rather, what are our sources for Nabataean law? Although some legal customs can be inferred and gleaned from literary sources about the Nabataeans, most, if not all, the evidence derives from documentary texts, inscriptions and papyri, written in the Nabataean script in Nabataean Aramaic (and as will become clear later on, also in Greek). This documentary evidence, to use John Healey's phrase, ‘is not “supported”, so to speak, by the survival of any contemporary or later literature in Nabataean’. ‘Unsupported’ is indeed an understatement: in contrast to Roman or Jewish law for example, a vacuum exists outside the documents whose testimony cannot be enhanced, modified, explained or nuanced by a body of literary legal tradition. In this Nabataean shares the fate of several other Near Eastern Semitic languages represented by epigraphic documents alone. On the other hand, the Nabataean legal document in the Nabataean script is part of the ‘Aramaic common law tradition’, and its formulae and provisions can be profi tably compared and contrasted with sibling documents. My aim in the present exercise, however, is not to detect identity, similarity and continuity of formulae, not even ‘to identify the diversity existing within commonality’ of ‘heirs to a rich Aramaic tradition,’ but rather to isolate pieces of substantive Nabataean law, more precisely the Nabataean law of persons. Paradoxically as it may seem at first sight, my task was rendered easier by the fact that I rely on documents written mostly in Greek rather than in Nabataean Aramaic.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFrom Hellenism to Islam
Subtitle of host publicationCultural and Linguistic Change in The Roman Near East
PublisherCambridge University Press
Pages154-174
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)9780511641992
ISBN (Print)9780521875813
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2009

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Cambridge University Press 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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