Book Title: The Taxonomy of the Legal Document
Subtitle: An Account of the Language and Terminology of Clauses in Greek Legal Documents from Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt
Book Description: This book presents the results of a long-term investigation into the structure of Greek legal documents preserved on papyrus. It provides a clause-by-clause analysis of 281 formulations used in contracts, mostly from Egypt, spanning the early Hellenistic to the late Byzantine period. Designed as both a typology and a research tool, the study is based on the Synallagma database—a digital corpus first created with the support of the Israel Science Foundation and now hosted at the University of Münster. The approach is philological, quantitative, and comparative: each clause is examined for its syntactic form, legal function, and diachronic trajectory. The goal is to uncover the linguistic mechanisms by which scribes encoded rights, duties, and transfers of ownership. As a contribution to legal history and historical linguistics, the book offers an empirical foundation for the study of formulaic writing in antiquity—well beyond the specific body of sources it analyzes.
Contents
Book Information
Book Description
This book presents the results of a long-term investigation into the structure of Greek legal documents preserved on papyrus. It provides a clause-by-clause analysis of 281 formulations used in contracts, mostly from Egypt, spanning the early Hellenistic to the late Byzantine period. Designed as both a typology and a research tool, the study is based on the Synallagma database—a digital corpus first created with the support of the Israel Science Foundation and now hosted at the University of Münster. The approach is philological, quantitative, and comparative: each clause is examined for its syntactic form, legal function, and diachronic trajectory. The goal is to uncover the linguistic mechanisms by which scribes encoded rights, duties, and transfers of ownership. As a contribution to legal history and historical linguistics, the book offers an empirical foundation for the study of formulaic writing in antiquity—well beyond the specific body of sources it analyzes.
Licence
The Taxonomy of the Legal Document Copyright © 2025 by Uri Yiftach is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Subject
Language and Linguistics
Metadata
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The Taxonomy of the Legal Document Copyright © 2025 by Uri Yiftach is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.