Description: The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study whilst clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, volume one of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.
Brief description: Clifford Ando is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History at the University of Chicago. He is the author, translator, or editor of twenty-one books, including Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000), Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition (2011), and Roman Social Imaginaries (2016).