Legal Documents in Ancient Societies

Volume 55,2 presents the contributions of the eighth meeting of the Working Group “Legal Documents in Ancient Societies”, which was devoted to the topic “Accounts and Bookkeeping in the Ancient World”. The volume is dedicated to an early and seemingly ubiquitous type of text, which often followed certain classification criteria and which, for the sake of easier clarity, was gladly subjected to a specially developed layout. In addition to the discussions of individual artefacts or artefact groups as well as literary texts, there are considerations of ancient and modern terminology, the choice of writing media used for this purpose, the bodies entrusted with data collection, the purposes pursued with it, the further processing and archiving of the collected data as well as their organisation at the various levels of administration. The examples from Emar and early Greece again show that a written version was by no means self-evident. The contributions not only draw attention once again to the high level of knowledge that can be gained from such a comparative approach, but also to the great potential of the always underestimated and only seemingly unattractive format of lists and directories. This undoubtedly applies to the entire field of economic administration, but also to questions of military affairs, demography, and sociology, for whose research this serial material is of importance that should not be underestimated.