Why Carve the Law Into a Stone Slab? So Nobody Can Say They Did Not Know

The form is simple and has been reinvented repeatedly, consisting of a slab of stone set upright, usually taller than it is wide, carrying carved text or images or both on one or more faces. The top is frequently shaped, rounded or gabled or carved with a scene, and the base is set into the ground or into a socket. Size ranges from a marker under a metre to monuments over two metres tall. The defining feature is not the shape but the purpose, which is to place a statement somewhere it will be seen, cannot be moved easily and cannot be altered quietly.

A small number of purposes account for most surviving examples:

• •Marking a grave and naming the person buried there
• •Publishing laws or a legal code where people could consult it
• •Recording a treaty or a boundary between states
• •Commemorating a victory and listing what was taken
• •Recording a gift to a temple and the terms attached
• •Marking a territorial claim at the limit of an expedition

Texts written on papyrus, parchment or wood survive only in unusual conditions, so the written record of the ancient world is heavily filtered by what happened to be durable, and stone survives where almost nothing else does. That gives these objects a disproportionate weight in what is known. The famous Babylonian law code survives because it was carved on a stone pillar, later carried off as loot, and buried where it was found intact in 1901. Egyptian and Greek examples record temple accounts, the wages of workmen and the terms of alliances, which are the ordinary administrative details rarely preserved otherwise. The most famous of all carries the same decree in three scripts, which is what allowed Egyptian writing to be read again.

A surviving example is rarely as informative as it first appears, and several difficulties recur. Stone weathers, so outdoor examples lose their surfaces, and text legible when excavated can fade within decades of exposure. Many were reused as building material, so a slab survives as a doorstep with half its text cut away. Many were deliberately defaced, with the name of a disgraced ruler chiselled out, which is itself evidence of something. And the text is public statement rather than private record, written to be seen, so it presents the version its commissioner wanted preserved, which makes it excellent evidence of claims and unreliable evidence of events.

The form appears in societies with no contact with each other, which suggests it follows from the material rather than from borrowing. Mesopotamian and Egyptian examples are the oldest and most numerous. Greek cities published decrees on them in large numbers, and thousands survive. Maya cities in Central America erected them in plazas recording the reigns and rituals of rulers with precise dates, and reading them transformed understanding of that civilisation. Chinese examples record imperial edicts and the texts of classics carved so that accurate copies could be taken. Ethiopian examples at Aksum include some of the largest single pieces of stone ever quarried and raised anywhere.

An upright inscribed slab makes a statement public, permanent and hard to alter, which suited laws, treaties, boundaries, gifts and graves. Stone survives where papyrus and wood do not, so these objects carry a disproportionate share of the surviving ancient record, including a Babylonian law code, Greek civic decrees, Maya dynastic histories and the trilingual decree that reopened Egyptian writing.