Legal Pluralism in Antiquity: the Babatha and Salome Komaise Archives

In the early second century CE, two Jewish women, Babatha and Salome Komaise, lived in the village of Maoza on the southern coast of the Dead Sea. This was first part of the Nabataean Kingdom, but came under direct Roman rule in 106 CE as part of the province of Roman Arabia. The archives these two women left behind not only provide a tantalizing glimpse into their legal lives and those of their families, but also offer a vivid window onto the ways in which the inhabitants of this region interacted with their new rulers and how this affected the practice of law in this part of the Roman Empire. 

The papers in these archives are remarkable in their legal diversity, detailing Babatha and Salome Komaise's property and marriages, as well as their disputes. Nabataean, Roman, Greek, and Jewish legal elements are all in evidence, and are often combined within a single papyrus. Through a series of case studies of the people involved in the creation of the papyri - the scribes, legal advisors, local arbitrators, Roman judges, and the litigants themselves - we can build up a picture of the ways in which they variously perceived and approached the law, and thus of legal practice itself as being heavily influenced by the particular agents involved. Thus, beyond the study of the specific institutions involved in these transactions, we get a glimpse of ideas, attitudes, and perceptions of law, that make help us to better understand the actual functioning of law and justice in this particular localized legal culture and in other similar small communities in the Roman Empire.

 

For any further information or to subscribe for the seminar, please contact the chair via:

lst.alonso@rwi.uzh.ch