Cracking the codex: Long lost Roman legal document discovered
Dr Simon Corcoran and Dr Benet Salway of the history department at University College London have found fragments of an important Roman law code that previously had been thought lost forever.
It’s believed to be the only original evidence yet discovered of the Gregorian Codex – a collection of constitutions upon which a substantial part of most modern European civil law systems are built.
They made their remarkable find by painstakingly linking 17 pieces of seemingly incomprehensible parchment. Together they form, according to Dr Salway, “a page or pages from a late antique codex book – rather than a scroll or a lawyer’s loose-leaf notes,” judging by the number of abbreviations within characteristic of legal texts, and the presence of writing on both sides of the fragments....