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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 241 the temple of Cybele at Sardis, but recording a contract made about 280, illuminates the operation of the principle and the circumstances which tended to make it binding. In Egypt the evidence of papyri illustrates it. The most striking reference to it is in the Gospel of Luke ii. 1-3, where it appears in the principle that every person had his own proper home (I8ia) ; and, although he was free to leave this home, he was by an edict of the Emperor Augustus bound to go back once every fourteen years to his own home to be counted in the imperial census. Augustus did not originate the tendency to restriction to the ISia ; and the true spirit of the empire was against it. The custom of restriction to the i6Ya hardened into law, but did not become the law of the empire until A. d. 415, when the owner of the land was recognized as possessing a legal right to the work of the cultivator. Connected with this are certain aspects of the feudal system and the whole system of serfdom in Europe during the middle ages, which lasted in Russia down to 1861. There is surely evidence to be gathered about the early stages in the growth of this attachment to the soil during the period which Mr. Hall treats, and we should be glad to see in a new edition of his excellent book a chapter on the subject. On p. 205 a tantalizing allusion occurs to the development of ancient Babylonian law. The laws ' relating to agriculture, to the recovery of debt, and the conditions of divorce are especially interesting '. There is no further allusion to the first two topics, except that a foot-note remarks upon the large literature which has grown up about these laws. The third topic is treated in the remainder of the paragraph, and the curious fact is pointed out that in old Sumerian times the wife had no such rights, which were reserved for the man alone ; but in the time of Kham- murabi the law had been modified in favour of the woman. As a general rule the tendency of war and conquest is to exaggerate the rights of the man and diminish the rights of the woman. Peace is favourable to the female side, and brings out the importance of the woman in economic life and society generally. Mr. Hall's paragraph concludes with a brief allusion to the fact that in the ancient Sumerian laws ' the man is more important than the woman, the father than the mother, the husband than the wife ', and he points out the striking contrast to Egypt, where the ' Lady of the House ' was usually a more im- portant person than the mere ' Male ', as the husband was called,.and where men often preferably traced their descent in the female line. In Egypt there was always a strong trace of Mutterrecht, but none in Babylon. Still women were, generally speaking, quite as independent in Babylon as in Egypt. They could own property, whether in houses or slaves, and could personally plead in the Courts. It is true that (as is stated at the beginning of this review) one cannot rightly understand Hellenism without appreciating the conditions amid which Hellenism was developed and the nature of pre-Hellenic civilization. The reviewer has maintained this principle for forty years ; ^nd the earlier of those forty years were spent in the wilderness. He wholly agrees with Mr. Hall in this respect. But to exaggerate this so as to compel students to study hypotheses, more or less fanciful and all necessarily inadequate, is educationally worse than the dictum of Grote that all early Greek history is mere myth, or Freeman's principle (sound in itself ) that to know any part VOL. XXXVI. — NO. CXLII. R