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tain a mixture of paragraphs: some appear to be excerpts from a
law code; others are clearly clauses from standard contracts.
The same mixture of law-code paragraphs and contractual forms
is found in the Demotic Law Code of Hermopolis (P. Mattha), from
Egypt of the Hellenistic period. The document is evidence that a
similar scholastic tradition must have existed in Egypt, earlier man-
ifestations of which have not survived.1.1.2.6 Transactional Records
The overwhelming mass of legal sources consists of records of legal
transactions—contracts, testaments, grants, treaties, etc. Most of these
are in Sumerian or Akkadian from Mesopotamia and Syria, but a
sprinkling of documents is found in other languages and scripts, such
as hieratic, Demotic, and Aramaic. On the one hand, these docu-
ments are a highly credible source of evidence about the law; they
are a contemporary record of the law in practice, untrammeled by
any literary or ideological distortions. On the other, it should be
remembered that private contracts and comparable transactions do
not make law; they function within a framework of the existing laws.
A contract is not direct evidence of legal norms but of the reactions
of the parties to those norms. A contract seeks to exploit laws, it
may even to try to evade laws, but (except perhaps for international
treaties) it cannot make or alter laws by itself. The norms of posi-
tive law remain a shadowy presence behind the terms of the indi-
vidual transaction, still to be reconstructed by the historian.1.1.2.7 Letters
Both public and private letters may be a source of law. If the sender
is a person in authority acting in his official capacity, then the let-
ter can be a direct source of law—a judgment, directive, command,
or response regulating the rights of an individual or group of per-
sons. The only qualification is that the very individuality of the let-
ter’s focus may leave obscure the legal principles on which the
authority’s decision was based. If the sender is a private individual,
then the evidence it provides, while often of great value, is indirect.
Nonetheless, a complaint or petition may invoke a particular law,
and many references, conscious and unconscious, to laws are found
in private correspondence. This is particularly so for the merchants
of the Old Assyrian period, whose copious correspondence provides
deep insight into the legislative and judicial activity of the authori-
ties that governed them.WESTBROOK_F2_1-90 8/27/03 1:39 PM Page 11