Gortyn code
The Gortyn code of law (also called the Great Code[1]) was the codification of the civil law of the ancient Greek city state ofGortyn, southern Crete. Our sole source of knowledge of the code is the fragmentary boustrophedon inscription on the circular walls of what might have been a bouleuterion or other public civic building. The original building was 100 feet in diameter, the 12 columns of text which survive are 30 feet in length and 5 feet in height and contain some 600 lines of text. In addition some further broken texts survive; the so-called second text[2]. It is the largest continuous piece of Greek epigraphy extant, and evidence suggests it is the work of a single sculptor. The inscription has been dated at the first half of the 5th century. The code deals with such matters as disputed ownership of slaves, rape and adultery, the rights of a wife when divorced or a widow, the custody of children born after divorce, inheritance, sale and mortgaging of property, ransom, children of mixed (slave, free and foreign) marriages, and adoption.
The first fragment of the code was discovered in the 1850s. German archaeologist Federico Halbherr found a further four columns of the text while excating a site near a local mill in 1884. Since this was evidently part of a larger text he, Ernest Fabricius and a team obtained permission to excavate the rest of the site, revealing 8 more text columns whose stones had been reused as part of the foundations of a Roman Odeion from the 1st century BCE. This wall has now been partially reconstructed.
The Great Code is written in the Dorian dialect and is one of a number of legal texts found scattered across Crete, though curiously no non-legal texts from ancient Crete survive. The Code stands with a tradition of Cretan law which taken as a totality represents the only substantial corpus of law from antiquity found outside of Athens. The whole corpus of Gortynian law may be divided into three broad categories: the earliest (I. Cret. IV 1-40., ca. 600 BCE to ca. 525 BCE) was inscribed on the steps and walls of the temple of Apollo Pythios, the next a sequence including the Great Code written on the walls in or near the agora between ca. 525 and 400 BCE (I. Cret. 41-140), followed by the laws (I. Cret. 141-159) which contain Ionian characters and so are dated to the 3rd century. Though all the texts are fragmentary it has been possible to trace the development of the law from Archaic proscriptions onwards, notably the diminishing rights of women and the increasing rights of slaves, and also allows us to infer some aspects of public law. The high importance of the Great Code in illuminating pre-Hellenistic law and society has lead some classicists in poeticising moments to refer to it as the “Queen of inscriptions”.
Notes
References
- Inscriptiones Creticae, M. Guarducci, 1935-1950
- R. F. Willetts, The Law Code of Gortyn, 1967
- Michael Gagarin, David J. Cohen (eds), Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law, 2005.
- J. Whitley, Cretan Laws and Cretan Literacy, Am. J. Archaeol. 101(4). 1997.