Episteme as Configurative Process: Episteme between Theory and Practice in Cuneiform Law (A01)

• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: from 2012 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 191249397

Cuneiform law is documented through systematised collections of epistemic juridical knowledge, on the one hand, and documents pertaining to contemporary legal practise, on the other. The project investigates the relation between law collections and contemporaneous legal documents by way of two case studies dealing with the mid-third millennium ‘Reform Texts of Urukagina’ and the late-second millennium ‘Middle Assyrian Laws’, respectively, examining in how far historical contingency as well as formal and socio-political configurative processes determine the formation of systematised juridical knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 980: Episteme in Motion - Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period
• Applicant Institution: Freie Universität Berlin
• Project Head: Professorin Dr. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum