|
The Gortyn code (also called the Great Code〔''I. Cret.'' IV.72〕) was a legal code that was the codification of the civil law of the ancient Greek city-state of Gortyn in southern Crete. == History == Our sole source of knowledge of the code is the fragmentary boustrophedon inscription〔The terms "Gortyn code" and "Great Code" may be used interchangeably for the text and the inscription.〕 on the circular walls of what might have been a bouleuterion or other public civic building in the agora of Gortyn. The original building was in diameter; the 12 columns of text which survive are in length and in height and contain some 600 lines of text. In addition, some further broken texts survive; the so-called second text.〔''I. Cret.'' IV 41-50〕 It is the longest extant ancient Greek inscription except for the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Evidence suggests it is the work of a single sculptor. The inscription has been dated to the first half of the 5th century BCE.〔Willets 1967, p. (8 )〕 The first fragment of the code was discovered in the 1850s. Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr found a further four columns of the text while excavating a site near a local mill in 1884. Since this was evidently part of a larger text, he, with Ernst 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. The wall bearing the Code has now been partially reconstructed. The Great Code is written in the Dorian dialect and is one of a number of legal inscriptions found scattered across Crewe but curiously, very few nonlegal texts from ancient Crete survive.〔See J. Whitley ''The Archaeology of Ancient Greece'' p. 248 for a statistical analysis.〕 The Dorian language was then pervasive among Cretan cities such as Knossos, Lyttos, Axos and various other areas of central Crete.〔''see Willetts, "The Law Code of Gortyn"〕 The Code stands with a tradition of Cretan law, which taken as a totality represents the only substantial corpus of Greek law from antiquity found outside Athens. The whole corpus of Cretan 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.'' IV 41-140), followed by the laws (''I. Cret.'' IV 141-159), which contain Ionian characters and so are dated to the 4th century. Though all the texts are fragmentary and show evidence of a continuous amendment of the law,〔See J. Davies:''Deconstructing Gortyn: When is a CODE a Code?'', in ''Greek Law in its Political Setting'' L Foxhall, ADE Lewis (eds).〕 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. Also, one can infer some aspects of public law. The high importance of the Great Code in illuminating pre-Hellenistic law and society has led some classicists in poeticising moments to refer to it as the "queen of inscriptions" but the same phrase was used for the ''Monumentum Ancyranum''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gortyn code」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|